Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I am very disappointed with that reply. I expected more than a rehash of "official-speak" waffle. After seven years these carriers are still no more than drawing board concepts. The Minister's right honourable friend Adam Ingram admitted in the other place last Friday that the Government still have no,
	"proper understanding of the costs involved".—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/05; col. 854 W.]
	Will the Minister now get a grip on this crucial project? As our existing carriers are due to be phased out in 2012 and 2015, are the in-service dates for the new carriers still 2012 and 2015, and, if not, what are the contingency plans to fill the gap?

Lord Garden: My Lords, having heard the Minister give evidence to the Defence Select Committee three weeks ago, I congratulate him on taking a grip on this programme, which has been a shambles for the past seven years. However, while he may be able to do the risk reduction exercise for the shipbuilding elements, over which he has a degree of control, how will he do it for the Joint Strike Fighter over which he has so little control and where we have to leave it to the Americans to decide when they will give it to us, what it will be like and how much it will cost?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, the planned out-of-service date for the current carriers is the in timescale of 2012–13.

Lord Goldsmith: My Lords, on the noble and learned Lord's first question, absolutely. So far as all prosecutions in England and Wales are concerned, it is essential that prosecutors judge objectively the evidence and satisfy themselves that it is sufficient—as he says, that there is a realistic prospect of conviction—and that it is in the public interest to prosecute. Of course, that does not mean that all prosecutions that will be brought succeed. If we only prosecuted cases that were certain to succeed, there would many people on the streets who had committed offences and got away with them. The fact that a case does not succeed does not mean that it was not right to bring the prosecution. I do not know precisely which case the noble and learned Lord has in mind; one relating to the Army has been referred to recently in which the Judge Advocate General, who decided the case, made it absolutely plain in his judgment that it was right to bring the prosecution because of the serious allegations made. There were other criticisms, which are being looked at, as the House knows.

Baroness Whitaker: My Lords, does my noble and learned friend agree that is hypocritical to castigate governments in foreign countries for corruption if we do not put our own house in order? If so, on the basis that Kofi Annan said that there was an immediate need for national authorities to investigate their companies, can he tell us what investigations there are of the other eight British companies named in the Volcker report?

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What guidance is given to recently retired civil servants regarding the publication of memoirs relating to their period of service?

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean: My Lords, is it the Government's policy to extend the rules and guidance to the spouses of senior Ministers? I ask because, in respect of the book that has already been mentioned, the Foreign Secretary expressed outrage on the radio at the references to the state of undress of former Prime Minister, Sir John Major, in briefings. I recall that the first time I read such references, including a quote from the then-Mr Christopher Meyer, was on page 252 of The Goldfish Bowl, the author of which was a certain Cherie Booth.

Baroness Amos: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
	Moved, That the debates on the Motions in the names of the Lord Freeman and the Lord Fowler set down for today shall each be limited to two and a half hours—(Baroness Amos.).

Lord Freeman: rose to call attention to the United Kingdom's relations with the Commonwealth; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, I am delighted to be able to open this important debate. I and many other noble Lords are strong supporters of the Commonwealth. We have today a very impressive list of speakers from all sides of the House, and I am particularly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, the Leader of the House, for agreeing to wind up the debate. Given her knowledge and long experience of overseas affairs, particularly of international development, your Lordships will benefit greatly from her contribution.
	Many noble Lords will have visited many countries in the Commonwealth. Some will, like myself, have family ties in those countries or have had ministerial responsibilities there, so this debate augers well for contributions based on experience. I hope that the conclusion of the debate will show that this House very strongly supports the Commonwealth and looks forward to it thriving in the future.
	This debate is particularly timely because next week in Malta there will be the biennial meeting of the Commonwealth heads of government (CHOGM). I hope very much that the comments made in the debate will be distilled by the noble Baroness and conveyed to colleagues who will be going to Malta.
	First, I wish to reinforce the obvious: the Commonwealth is a unique institution. The Statute of Westminster in 1931 established the Commonwealth, but it was directly after the war that it grew in size. Today it contains 53 member countries together with 11 territories. I wish to return briefly in a moment to the issue of the territories, which are often forgotten in debates on the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth has 30 per cent of the world's population, 40 per cent of the World Trade Organisation's members and 25 per cent of world trade and investment.
	Why is the Commonwealth unique? It is unique because it contains both developed and developing countries and therefore is wholly unlike the European Union. The Commonwealth contains 13 of the fastest growing nations in the world and 14 of the poorest. So it has the complete gamut in terms of economic wealth and performance. It is bound by, by and large, a common language. English, if not the native language, is the first foreign language of preference. Although Her Majesty's Government contribute some 30 per cent of the costs of the Commonwealth, we have one voice and all the other members are equal.
	That is certainly unlike the United Nations, which is a pyramidical structure dominated in its debates and decisions by the larger countries, and especially those on the Security Council. It is multi-faith—I shall return to that issue in due course—but, most importantly, it is built on democratic principles: parliamentary government, the rule of law and respect for all citizens, of whatever religion or race. There is the principle of tolerance and understanding of the points of view and beliefs of every citizen in the Commonwealth. No other world grouping of nations comes close to the Commonwealth. One sometimes thinks great nations such as the United States and our neighbours in the European Union envy the United Kingdom's position in the Commonwealth and the influence that it can bring to bear.
	However, this nation is in danger of missing a great opportunity to continue to champion the Commonwealth. There is a generation gap in understanding of the Commonwealth. How many of our children and grandchildren have the same interest in approach to our knowledge of the Commonwealth as the over-60s? I cast my eye around your Lordships' Chamber and believe that most, if not all, of us have been brought up with the Commonwealth. That does not go for the generations behind us. Indeed, my children's generation often connect the Commonwealth more with cricket than with issues of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. So we have a duty—this House has a duty—to champion the Commonwealth.
	What can we do, what should we do to nurture and support the future of the Commonwealth? I commend to your Lordships the 2005 report by the Commonwealth Secretariat as a starting point. It is an excellent report and describes the broad range of initiatives, many of which have been championed and, indeed, initiated by Her Majesty's Government, that are being pursued at present. In the time available to me, I want to cover three aspects mentioned in the report that should be developed further and make some suggestions about them.
	The first aspect is upholding democracy, the rule of law and the equal treatment of citizens. The Commonwealth has taken a tough stance in the past and expelled or suspended members that are clearly not adhering to those principles—South Africa, on the issue of apartheid, Nigeria and Pakistan. All three of those countries have since rejoined the Commonwealth. Zimbabwe was suspended and later withdrew from the Commonwealth. Pressure has been brought to bear in the past and I hope that Her Majesty's Government will pursue a resolute line on Zimbabwe on behalf of the whole of the Commonwealth. I know that some of my noble friends will pursue that issue with greater experience than I, but with equal force.
	We should not forget that one important method of pursuing the principles of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law is the quiet persuasion and diplomacy that goes on within the Commonwealth. That is unlike the United Nations, the European Union and other groupings of nations. The Prime Ministers and leaders of individual nations talk to each other, bring pressure to bear and resolve conflicts. That has been very successful in the past.
	I make one plea, and I know that the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) shares this view. I pay tribute to the work that the CPA has done—not only the UK branch but the association throughout the Commonwealth. More parliamentary support from your Lordships is needed. Some of our delegations abroad need to be strengthened. Indeed, some visits have been cancelled in recent years. We should not forget our obligation as legislators, as parliamentarians, to support the CPA.
	I believe strongly in the secondment of some of our judges and barristers to courts within the Commonwealth where that is requested. I think especially of Sierra Leone, where I judge there to be a real requirement for support from some of our judges to go to sit in the courts of Sierra Leone, especially to help in the matter of corruption. There is a common fund for technical co-operation, run by the Commonwealth, which covers public administration. I should like to see greater use of that fund made in seconding some of our judges.
	A further initiative could be for Commonwealth citizens—young people graduating from United Kingdom universities, especially those from Africa and the Caribbean, particularly those who have studied law, history or politics—to offer to return to their native countries in the Commonwealth to help with the process of better governance. Sometimes, the elite who come to study in this country from the Commonwealth, although idealistic and anxious to provide for themselves and their families, have an obligation to provide for their country of birth and origin more advice and more effort. Within the ambit of funds presently available to the Commonwealth Secretariat, I would like to see the creation of Commonwealth fellows for graduates, perhaps trialled for just one year, the fortunate few returning to help the unfortunate many.
	Secondly, I wish to comment on economic issues. I point out the obvious when I say that there is a great heritage within the Commonwealth of common English based on English antecedence, common commercial law and common financial law. At CHOGM in Malta, I would like to see agreement to take to the World Trade Organisation, which will meet in Hong Kong in December, a very clear message that trade barriers must come down. I think that most of your Lordships believe in the principle of free trade. The real devil is in the detail: the transitional provisions to allow developing and developed countries to benefit from greater free trade. The United Kingdom has long, hard, practical experience in negotiating in such matters, and I hope that we will take a lead.
	Thirdly, I would like to see the private finance initiative—the principles that we have learnt and operated for the past decade in this country—transported to some countries in the Commonwealth, particularly as regards infrastructure. The very excellent report Business Environment Survey 2005, published by the Commonwealth Business Council, said that the private sector in this country viewed the lack of good infrastructure—I mean, principally roads—as a major impediment for investment in developing countries, particularly in Africa. I would like to see British construction companies using the PFI principle, building some of the roads using local labour and, rather like the Birmingham Northern Relief Road—one of the first toll roads to be built in this country for many years—for them to be repaid through government aid or through the revenues of the developing nations over perhaps 20 or 30 years.
	Good road transportation brings agricultural produce to the ports. It helps with education, health, security and, above all, employment of local labour. In northern Uganda and Sierra Leone there are great problems with young people who have been caught up in conflict, have no job and are waiting for some form of constructive employment. Unless individual nations do something quickly about their predicament, there will be future trouble.
	I know that my noble friend Lady Hooper, who wishes to contribute to this debate but may not be able to do so owing to other pressures, wanted to raise tertiary education for young people coming from Commonwealth territories. They have no tertiary education. I believe that my noble friend is right to argue for relief on tuition fees for people coming from those territories.
	Finally, the good education of youngsters in the Commonwealth, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, leads to greater racial and religious understanding. I was interested that Kofi Annan was reported to have said in Tunis yesterday that he would like to see greater export of information technology, particularly computers, to some of the poorer countries. Nowadays young people learn by using the world wide web and communicate through the Internet. We are wasting a great opportunity in this country. How many noble Lords change their own laptops every two or three years, and even those in the Houses of Parliament? What happens to the second-hand computers? Nothing. We could export to the Commonwealth an enormous wealth of equipment at a much lower cost than that for new equipment. I congratulate the Council for Education in the Commonwealth on pioneering the idea, as well as on its work, particularly in Sierra Leone.
	I conclude by repeating that I am a strong supporter of the Commonwealth. It is a force for good. I have made some modest proposals for further improvement. I hope that the Minister will convey from this House to the meeting in Malta the strong support it maintains for the Commonwealth. Long may it thrive.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine: My Lords, we, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, for introducing this debate, which foreshadows the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malta next week.
	As the noble Lord pointed out, the theme of this year's CHOGM is designed to highlight the role of information technology in development. It comes at a particularly appropriate time, when one cannot underestimate the impact of the global digital revolution in transforming lives in developing countries and bringing knowledge to remote areas of the globe. Moreover, its impact on the smaller member states of the Commonwealth—the Pacific islands, which are remote even by modern standards of travel—is enormous in that it links their educational establishments to higher education centres through the Commonwealth of Learning.
	But—and there is always a "but" in technological advance—the role and use of technology will always be subservient to other, more essential, needs for many Commonwealth citizens, including the basic need for clean drinking water, for food and for drugs to inoculate against diseases that have been eradicated in the West for decades.
	This brings me to one of the substantial points that I wish to make in the debate today: the question that nearly 2 billion citizens of the Commonwealth expect the United Kingdom to answer as it holds the presidencies of the European Union and the G8. That question is how we can reconcile our rhetoric with our deeds—over poverty and development, on the one hand, and our failure to arrive at an EU position consistent with our rhetoric in this regard apropos the forthcoming WTO negotiations, on the other.
	We had the Prime Minister telling us as recently as the UN world summit in September that,
	"if we end up with a failure in December, that will echo right round the world, and I am not prepared to have that, at least without the most monumental struggle".
	While many on these Benches would applaud the Prime Minister's appetite for monumental struggles, most negotiators believe that persuasion is a more powerful tool to bring people round to your point of view.
	But "struggle" is where we are in many aspects of the UK's presidency. There is little question that the cost of failure in Hong Kong will impact severely on the many developing countries within the Commonwealth, where European agricultural protection takes such a heavy toll. We regret the failure of persuasion by the UK, over several years, whereby we have one country—France—holding out against the gains of billions of people to protect the interests of a few hundreds of thousands. We hope that the noble Baroness the Leader of the House will be able to reassure us that we, alongside Malta and Cyprus—countries that have a special responsibility through their membership of the Commonwealth and the EU—will do their utmost to persuade the French Government to move further in offering cuts to farm tariffs.
	But Commonwealth leaders are right to look ahead in a positive manner at the Malta meeting. There are areas where the Commonwealth, due to its cohesion as a group, achieves far more than other intergovernmental organisations, as was said so eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman. In its emphasis on agreeing fundamental political values through the Singapore and, unfortunately named, Harare declarations, the Commonwealth puts down a firm marker for its members of the standards of democracy and human rights to be expected of them. Many in this House might wish to see such minimum standards adopted at the United Nations.
	I should declare an interest here as I worked for the Commonwealth Secretariat from 1999 until 2003 and dealt with issues of governance, democracy and human rights. My period of service coincided with some of the more intractable problems in those regards—the military takeover in Pakistan and the rigging of elections in Zimbabwe, to note but two. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House will recall the energy and effort expended by Ministers in trying to resolve them. In Pakistan, it was to some extent pressure from the Commonwealth which brought about a transition to democracy. It is continuing vigilance on the part of the Commonwealth, which retains Pakistan on its ministerial "list" of transgressors, that secures its slow progress down the road towards full restoration of democracy.
	Zimbabwe, and its continued downward spiral, has more painful lessons for the international community as a whole. While its suspension and eventual departure from the Commonwealth on the one hand exposed the weakness of such sanctions that exist, many of us would argue that, on the other, the conviction of Commonwealth members in saying that it had no place at their table was indeed a sign of solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe over its leaders. If its parting from the Commonwealth had no weight, why did its leaders try so hard to stay within the organisation?
	Any failure of member states to conform to the fundamental values of human rights and democracy is a failure for all. It is to the credit of the Commonwealth that it gains as much value-added from its work in conflict resolution and democracy-building as it does from its small budget. Where democracy is embedded into the constitutional structure and value system of nations, there is little need for external mediation of disputes or light-touch conflict resolution. However, where it is newly embraced and the tradition of political pluralism is fragile, the work needed to assist with the resolution of differences between the executive and the opposition can be critical to political stability. This is where much of the Commonwealth's best work takes place, with the Secretary-General's good offices role in anticipating where problems might arise and where disputes need to be mediated.
	Likewise, where peaceful transitions from government to opposition are part of the political culture, external election observers are merely symbolic. But where this practice is not fully embedded, an external endorsement that elections have represented the will of the people becomes critical to that country's future stability.
	There is much need for work in this area among Commonwealth members. One has only to look at the prospect for a peaceful election in Uganda to see how fragile political systems still are in many countries. Will the noble Baroness the Leader of the House be able to reassure us that the UK will continue to press for the forthcoming elections in Uganda to be conducted in an atmosphere free from intimidation, violence and manipulation of electoral law? Will the Government also pledge themselves to increased financial assistance in these vital areas of the work of the Commonwealth?
	In concluding, I will touch on the relevance of the Commonwealth in today's globalising world. But my question will be narrower: is the Commonwealth still relevant to the UK? Looking at the half-hearted approach of successive UK governments to the organisation, one is inclined to think that it is less and less so. We started some 60 years ago from Churchill's concentric circles of the US-UK special relationship overlapping with the UK's relations with the EU overlapping with the special role of the UK in the Commonwealth. We now find ourselves in a situation where we have moved far from those overlapping interests to a policy which can at best be described as indifferent.
	So we cannot fight our friends' corner at the WTO; nor are we ready to pursue reform of the United Nations Security Council in the interests of our partners from within the Commonwealth. Ultimately, our energy in foreign policy terms seems dedicated to complying with the wishes of the one superpower in a uni-polar world.
	Those in the Commonwealth who have witnessed this gradual change in the desire of the UK to be an active player in the Commonwealth must consider these changes too. I believe that the Commonwealth is indeed relevant, particularly to those smaller states which do not play a role on the international stage and which value the practical work done by the Commonwealth in their interests. Perhaps the FCO might be induced to review its long-term approach towards its Commonwealth partners in the light of its strategic goals and conclude that it needs a change of tack. We on these Benches await such a review and the more positive role that might emerge from that.

Lord Craig of Radley: My Lords, the topic chosen by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, is most welcome and well timed.
	Last Sunday, I was in Lesotho, so I attended the Armistice Day service in the capital, Maseru. It was a very moving open-air ceremony. Following a two-minute silence, wreaths were laid at the impressive war memorial by their Majesties the King and Queen, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the mayor of Maseru, the doyen of the diplomatic corps in Lesotho the Libyan ambassador, the High Commissioner for South Africa, the Chinese ambassador, the acting US ambassador, the so-called EU ambassador, and by consular representatives from Ireland, France, the United Nations, the African Union, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada, in that order. One of the many veterans present was the last to lay a wreath. It was touching to see that he had a small Union Jack flag flying from his black beret.
	There were at least 150 veterans prominently seated near the memorial, some wearing their old uniforms. Some 1,400 hundred Basotho soldiers served in World War I and well over 21,000 in World War II. Following the withdrawal of the UK High Commissioner, surely Her Majesty's Government should still arrange a formal UK presence at this and similar annual services.
	I was in Maseru to attend a CPTM dialogue, an annual event that alternates usually between an African country and Malaysia. CPTM— the Commonwealth Partnership for Technology Management—was set up a decade ago by CHOGM. It has a small headquarters, or hub, here in London. Apart from some funding to support the hub, CPTM works on a give and take networking basis, with those who are members drawn from all corners of the world, contributing advice and ideas to others to help them with their activities.
	Membership is widely drawn, not only from many different countries within the Commonwealth and some beyond the Commonwealth, but also from government, the private sector, labour, academia and the media. This Government gave £60,000 per annum at the start of their Administration, but no longer do so. An uncertain revenue stream for CPTM led to a decision two years ago to seek to raise a sum of around £11 million to provide a permanent home for the CPTM hub and a sufficient annual income to run it. A very commendable sum of around £5.4 million is now in CPTM's capital account and a further £1 million is pledged—all very creditable. A contribution from Her Majesty's Government would now be most welcome.
	At CHOGM 03, the Commonwealth Secretary-General was tasked to consider the roles of CPTM and CBC, the Commonwealth Business Council. He is reporting to CHOGM 05 that CPTM continues to enjoy success and has solid support from those who work with it, including a number of Commonwealth member governments. It has a distinct and positive role to play in the family of Commonwealth organisations and should continue, he says, its important and valued work.
	What, then, does CPTM do? Let me, in the time available, give just two examples of changes in southern Africa and elsewhere which have had their origins in the process of dialoguing. In 1997, the dialogue was hosted by Botswana. The concept of peace parks—areas which cross national borders and assist in the management of wildlife and the advancement of tourism, for example—was first discussed. This has now blossomed. There are 169 peace parks in 113 countries in Africa and Asia.
	A 1999 dialogue at Victoria Falls discussed the problems that tourists met when national requirements for visas complicated movement in southern Africa. Wild animals do not observe national boundaries, yet are one of the many exciting reasons for a visit to Africa. A freer regime for immigration control is now in place. Such changes achieve a win-win outcome which is of benefit to all. A driving idea behind the dialogues and the work of CPTM is to seek ways of being fair and benefiting all parties involved. Rather than winner-take-all, it is a prosper-my-neighbour approach. CPTM espouses these ideals in the phrase "smart partnership".
	Although CPTM assists, it falls to the hosting country to draw up the guest list and to make the many arrangements required to run a three or four day dialogue attended by 500 or more people. For Lesotho this year as for many others it is a major challenge requiring a great deal of time and effort. Woven into the formal arrangements are opportunities for attendees to see and appreciate the mix of business, cultural and artistic talents of the hosting nation and its region. All involved deserve great credit for what they achieve.
	One of many significant features of dialogues is the attendance of heads of state or government and former heads who have been attracted by smart partnership. From Commonwealth countries last week we had the presidents of Namibia and Mozambique; the new Deputy President of South Africa; a number of Commonwealth prime ministers including Prime Minister Badawi from Malaysia; former heads including President Sir Ketumile Masire, President Chissano and Prime Minister Dr Mahathir. All individually and collectively play a very active part, mixing freely with all others at the dialogue. It is a unique opportunity for them to meet, listen and participate in the discussions that form the central part of every dialogue. There is also a so-called Club 29, made up of younger smart partners, who make their own challenging contributions in the dialogue sessions. PFI, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, was also discussed last week.
	Between dialogues, CPTM will assist in work of national interest in a variety of Commonwealth countries. For example, Lesotho's Vision 2020 was drawn up with help from CPTM members in a number of other countries. President Museveni of Uganda is another very supportive partner. He was not in Maseru, but I met him two weeks ago here at the CPTM hub. He will bring the importance of CPTM to the attention of heads at CHOGM next week in Malta. There is great value in CPTM for developing countries of the Commonwealth. It deserves to be given the essential financial support to keep it going and to allow it to spread its smart partnership message for the good of the Commonwealth.

Lord Hunt of Chesterton: My Lords, I echo the thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, for introducing this debate. We should emphasise that the Commonwealth is an extraordinary resource for the United Kingdom. It hugely enriches our experience in many areas of life. It is the envy of many European countries, particularly in the university world. In the world of science, engineering and industry, the UK gains enormously from the Commonwealth, including the new Commonwealth. One of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century is Ramanujan from India. When I was at the Met Office, Professor Chan of Hong Kong university provided the key idea to improve the Met Office's forecasts of tropical cyclones, which, as I have mentioned before in this Chamber, was the most accurate forecast of Hurricane Katrina.
	We need to understand and appreciate the Commonwealth more. Culture is, of course, a remarkable dimension of that, and we now have bestseller novels and films coming from all over the Commonwealth. One is very pleased to see them coming from Africa as well as from south Asia. But I believe that we need to strengthen further our links with Commonwealth countries, strengthen institutions and make better use of our existing arrangements. Perhaps because so much of the new Commonwealth was born out of struggle, it can help in the complex world to reduce misunderstandings.
	I have been privileged to see a little bit of how the Commonwealth emerged, as I enjoyed an exotic childhood in India, in the colonial era, with dancing cobras on the floor on Christmas day. I was present at Merdeka in Malaya in 1957, when the guerrilla war was still under way. The United Kingdom's deputy high commissioner was asked to play on his piano for the Tunku Abdul Rahman Benjamin Britten's submission for the national anthem in an international competition; you can imagine that Benjamin Britten's submission was characteristic but unsuitable, and Malaya decided instead to slow down a local dance tune, which is still the national anthem. The deputy high commissioner was my father.
	In the 1960s, I saw an interesting aspect of the development of independence, with the Ugandan army not always working correctly as that country was tormented by crises following independence.
	In my career as an academic, working at the Met Office and as president of an NGO, I have made many visits to Commonwealth countries—14 in all—and worked with many colleagues at universities here in the UK. I was in Accra last week in a conference on coastal zones of sub-Saharan Africa, where we were bringing together technical people, including scientists and local government people.
	I shall make a few specific points on which the Minister might comment in her reply. First, as I have said before in this Chamber, we have many visiting experts coming to the UK, some of them to provide information to us but some of them to learn from our institutions. I believe that we have an inadequate way of introducing them—in fact, we do not introduce them—to the culture and history aspects of the UK. They come here and have a technical and academic experience and then go away. Last week we heard about the tragic expert who came to the University of Reading, learned about explosives and automatic systems and was one of the people involved in the bad events in Indonesia.
	The United States does much more to introduce people to the whole aspect of that country. Even mathematicians and scientists are told about the constitution of America. I am afraid that there seems still to be a feeling in Britain that if you are a mathematician, when you come to Britain you should just stay in your lab. I should remind noble Lords that the current Prime Minister of Singapore is a mathematician who was trained in Cambridge—so mathematicians can be quite important!
	My second point arises from our meetings last week with mayors of cities in Ghana. They commented that twinning cities is a very valuable way in which to share experience. There are two cities in Ghana that are twinned with cities in the UK. The high commissioner there commented that the process of facilitating and improving that system may need further work; I hope that the DfID could do that, as it is certainly called for in those countries. The Minister of Tourism and Modernisation of the capital city in Ghana commented that the city of Accra has three town planning officers and that the city of London has many hundreds, while Amsterdam has 600. He believes that our town planning and local government experts could perhaps be seconded to help with the extremely complex issues which arise when dealing with the urban areas in Africa.
	Thirdly, in non-governmental organisations, networks are flourishing, but more help needs to be given. It is interesting that the Commonwealth is not exclusive—it works with other networks—and in Africa the NePAD network is beginning to help in working with Commonwealth initiatives. I believe that we need to work wherever there are appropriate local networks. Academic support was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, with regard to the role of computers, which is very important. It is a tragedy to see academic and technical institutions in Africa having almost no scientific literature provided, when libraries here are throwing that out and it is not being circulated. There are projects for that, but it still does not seem to be getting through.
	My noble friend Lord Desai talked about natural disasters, which, along with climate change, are an important area, and not only for future emergencies. One of the real causes of concern is shortages of food as the climate changes. UK government agencies can provide the expertise to help and they could do more, with encouragement from central government. There always seems to be a budgetary problem in Whitehall about that. We have seen the RAF doing excellent work in India, but I believe that our government agencies could be encouraged more.
	Finally, I have a political question for the Minister that has not been raised: what are the rules for joining and leaving the Commonwealth? Mozambique is now in the Commonwealth, but I believe that Hong Kong is not. In fact, when I was at the Met Office, there was the interesting business of ensuring that Hong Kong remained as an independent member of many of the UN agencies. It is hosting the World Trade Organisation because it is in the World Meteorological Organisation. I believe it is no longer in the Commonwealth, however, and that affects people in terms of their eligibility for arrangements in the UK. Do we have an arrangement for those countries that, for special reasons, leave the Commonwealth, so that they have some associate category? That may be important.

Lord Howe of Aberavon: My Lords, I join with those who have spoken in thanking my noble friend Lord Freeman for giving us this opportunity. I decline, if I may, the opportunity to answer the question just posed by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, but I follow his example with a little reminiscence about one's own associations with the Commonwealth. Mine go back, I am afraid, to when I was nine years old.
	Like all those who attended Sunday school at Carmel chapel in Aberavon, I was given a card with a message from His Majesty King George V on his Silver Jubilee. I still have it, although I could not possibly find it. On it was the sentence,
	"I ask you to remember that in the days to come you will be the citizens of a great empire".
	Little did I imagine then that I would be lucky enough, 11 or 12 years later, to spend two years serving in east Africa with African troops, most of whom, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, has illustrated, served in the East African Division in the Burma campaign, some of whom came to Britain for the victory parade, and some of whom I tried to instruct in my limited Swahili about the difference between Bwana "Kingy George" and Bwana Joe Stalin.
	Some 40 years later, I had scarcely dreamt that I should be attending my first CHOGM meeting in New Delhi in 1983 alongside my noble friend Lady Thatcher. My noble friend Lord Freeman has said everything about the quality of discussion in those meetings: open, candid and constructive as nowhere else in the world, between representatives of every kind of sample of the human race. We discussed Grenada from very different points of view, but not challenging the conclusion offered by the then Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew: that the Americans ought not to have done it, but he was glad they did. Only the Commonwealth could produce that kind of judgment. Most impressively, my noble friend Lady Thatcher, in dialogue with Indira Gandhi and Julius Nyerere, was able to persuade them of her genuine commitment to progress in the search for nuclear disarmament.
	My noble friend Lord Freeman touched on a feature that has always struck me as valuable. When I went from Commonwealth finance ministers' meetings to meetings of the International Monetary Fund, I think I had an understanding of the problems of the rest of the world that was not available to other finance ministers—not least the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.
	I hope that the House will forgive me if I turn from those general observations to a much smaller issue—namely, the position of the Commonwealth Institute, as trailed by the noble Lord, Lord Desai. As the House will know, it was founded in 1886 for the benefit of education in what was then the Empire, and is now the Commonwealth. It now faces a wholly unmanageable conflict between its commitments and aspirations and its resources. I am not concerned to allocate responsibility for the present unsatisfactory situation, some of which rests upon me. My noble friend Lord Hurd has observed that it is a story from which none of us emerges with great credit. I am anxious only to help us find the right way forward with the aid of the Government. The commitment of the institute is very specific—and was endorsed by Heads of Government at the CHOGM meeting in 2003—namely, the establishment in Cambridge of the centre for commonwealth education, to which the noble Lord, Lord Desai, referred. Two years later that project is still hanging fire. That cannot be reconciled with the resources available to the institute, if any are available. It has no income flow whatever and has had none for at least a year. The only significant "asset" is the building off Kensington High Street, built in the late 1950s as a fresh home when Her Majesty's Government took over its old home in Kensington Gore. An additional burden was added to the task of maintaining that building when it was granted Grade II star listed status in 1988. That happened during my reign—if that is not the wrong word—at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. So far as I can discover it happened without my knowledge or consent, but it certainly happened during my watch and I accept responsibility for it.
	I gave the late Lord Braine a false premise for why we had gone along with what we discovered had happened. I wrote in a letter to him in 1989:
	"The implications may be advantageous to the institute in that . . . it may be eligible for additional grant assistance for maintenance and repairs".
	I could not have been more wrong. The subsequent history has totally shattered that illusion. In 2002, with the best of intentions, my noble friend Lord Blaker and the Leader of the House took part in a debate on the Commonwealth Act which fulfilled a joint aspiration—as it seems—on the part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to shed responsibility for the institute, and on the part of the institute to achieve a kind of total independence.
	For whatever reason the "dowry" that the Foreign Office conferred upon the institute fell far short of the cost of fulfilling the statutory obligation to restore and maintain the building. Within the past 18 months, with everyone's general consent, application was made to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport for the building to be delisted so as to free itself of that burden. I urge the Government to give full support to that prospect, because it seems to me to be the only way out of the present situation in which the institute is bereft of resources to fulfil its purpose. The outcome of a series of public Acts of this Parliament was that the trustees could not pursue a remedy by means of a Private Bill, which would be far too complicated. However, the matter is urgent. Indeed, it is urgent enough for a solution to be sought before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Valletta next week. Unless we seek an answer along those lines any value that may be left in the site and the building will redound to the benefit—who knows when?—of some unknown property developer, and certainly not to the benefit of the youth of the Commonwealth, which is its objective.
	Members of the Government are well aware of the issues that I raise. They are under discussion. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, has given personal attention to them. However, I urge the Government with as much energy and vigour as I can command to find a solution that really will resolve this and which will crack the problem rather than postponing it along the lines of the rather imperfect decisions that have been taken so far.

Lord Jones of Cheltenham: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, on introducing this timely debate. I speak as a great supporter of the Commonwealth. I particularly commend the work of the staff at the British high commissions around the Commonwealth, including officials at the Department for International Development. They do a splendid job, often with inadequate resources, particularly in the commercial field. Of course, here in Parliament we are well served by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, which arranges meetings with visitors from the Commonwealth and sends delegations of MPs and Lords to Commonwealth countries on what are usually very demanding schedules. The Government get good value from the voluntary overtime that parliamentarians put in when they join those delegations. The CPA also keeps a watchful eye on the large number of all-party Country Groups; I know that because I was instrumental in setting up the All-Party Group on Botswana a few years ago. I highly recommend membership of the CPA to any noble Lords who are not already members.
	I mentioned Botswana a moment ago, and I declare my interest in Botswana—it is in the Register. Africa is moving up the political agenda, and I congratulate the Prime Minister on putting it there, because he seems to believe that Africa should get better resources than it has currently. Whenever I come back from Africa, water is uppermost in my mind. Many African countries are very dry and suffer long droughts. There is evidence that climate change is not only reducing rainfall but leading to a fall in the water table. Millions of Africans do not have access to clean water, which leads to malnutrition, disease and crop failure. On my first visit to Africa, which was to Kenya with the CPA, I remember being told by a Member of Parliament from the north of the country how his constituents dealt with their water shortage. Women—it was always women—would get up in the morning and walk 10 miles to fill up buckets, walk 10 miles back, cook the evening meal, eat, go to bed, then get up in the morning and go and get water. That is not living; that is a grinding existence.
	I visited Uganda a few years ago, again with the CPA, where I met members of the Jinja Rotary Club, which is twinned with the Sunrise Rotary Club in Cheltenham. They showed me some of their projects, including securing water from a natural spring by installing pipes and concrete. The local people told me that there had been no rain and there was only a trickle of water dripping from the pipes. I remember saying, "I'll see what I can do", which in retrospect was a ridiculous thing to say. However, within half an hour we experienced the most dramatic thunderstorm and cloudburst, which went on for two hours or more. For the rest of the time we were in Uganda we took every opportunity to claim credit for bringing the rain.
	I know that water supply is not one of our Government's priorities, but it ought to be pushed higher up the priority list. The UK has many excellent water companies and engineers who are able to help dry countries to use their water supply better and give advice on putting in place infrastructure—dams, pipes, boreholes—which would improve the situation. The most important point is to help to train local Africans to maintain and expand their system of water conservation and recycling. Africans must design African solutions for African problems.
	Another aspect of African development which we have already heard about and which is important is the spread of democracy. I have taken part in a number of election monitoring missions in Africa: to South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Ghana, Gambia and Sierra Leone. My week in Sierra Leone was the toughest of my life. There was little food, no clean water and lots of mosquitoes. I lost a stone in weight, and when I came home my wife tried to send me back for another week so I would lose another stone. In each of the elections that I have observed, I have been struck by the enthusiasm of the voters to take part. Long queues formed everywhere, and people waited patiently for their turn; they knew it was important to vote.
	There are good examples of young democracies flourishing. I was present in Ghana when there was a peaceful change of government following the retirement of President Rawlings, the military man who seized power twice in coups. Discussion is going on in several countries about different ways of counting votes to reflect minorities. The Government should continue to help young democracies in setting up democratic, independent electoral commissions. I look forward to taking part in future election monitoring missions.
	I would like to say a few words about the British Overseas Territories, in which I take a great interest, and particularly to say something about St Helena, which is one of the smallest members of the Commonwealth. My former constituency of Cheltenham has had a 30-year education link with the island. St Helena has seen a massive reduction in population in recent years, to such an extent that many saw little future for the island. The only regular and fairly reliable access is the remaining Royal Mail ship still in use, the RMS "St Helena", which takes five days to get from Cape Town to St Helena. I visited the island and Ascension with the CPA in 2003, and was struck that the island's community was drifting away because there were few career opportunities. There is a desperate need for more rapid access and I am delighted that the UK Government have decided to build an airport, which has long been talked about.
	The island offers much to tourists, including visitors from France. Napoleon's home is still in existence, and French people are likely to flock there to see where their once-great hero lived. Around the island, there are the remains of more than 1,000 shipwrecks to attract divers, a reminder of the pivotal part that St Helena once played as a refuelling point for vessels of the East India Company.
	Noble Lords may have read the unfortunate article in the Sunday Times by the normally reliable environment editor Jonathan Leake, who seems to have got his facts twisted. The article states that a,
	"hotel and golf complex . . . would cover up to 15 per cent of the green belt".
	That is nonsense. It might take up 1 per cent of the delightfully named Broad Bottom site where the airport and leisure complex are likely to be built, but the environment overall will be much improved.
	Noble Lords will know that I made my maiden speech a few weeks ago on the subject of frozen pensions. I would like to press the noble Baroness the Leader of the House on the issue. It seems odd that people who have paid the same contributions towards their pensions are not given the same benefits when they retire, wherever they retire. That applies particularly to the overseas territories.
	I encourage all colleagues in this and the other House to visit the Commonwealth whenever they get the chance. Its people are always pleased to see us. I mentioned that my own interest is in Botswana, which provides fantastic resorts for tourists as well as having some of the gentlest people in the world.

The Earl of Sandwich: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, has already said that the Commonwealth is unique and a force for good. I agree. It is a subtle and effective channel of diplomacy, an institution which quietly makes connections and gets on with the business. In the current world trade talks, with members from every major trading group, the Commonwealth is a significant player. The CHOGM agenda will highlight trade and development at a critical time, with the likelihood of another breakdown of talks in Hong Kong which, of course, will affect the poorest countries most.
	The forthcoming summit will again focus on Africa. Some 18 Commonwealth countries are in Africa—one third of the Commonwealth's membership and two thirds of the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP). We have heard on many occasions that the African continent is the most vulnerable part of our planet and the noble Lord, Lord Jones, has given some examples. I was grateful to my noble friend Lord May for highlighting Africa in last week's climate change debate. This Government have given greater priority to Africa and have increased their aid budget and debt relief, but the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, will agree that not nearly enough has happened on trade.
	I have worked mainly with civil society organisations which have campaigned for genuine changes in trade through the Trade Justice campaign, which lobbied Parliament earlier this month. The Commission for Africa supported many of those changes at a high level, mainly through NePAD and the peer review mechanism, which includes the involvement of civil society. The Commonwealth summit is bound to endorse those. And yet the G8 summit was a disappointment for most trade campaigners because, seen by the poorest countries through the prism of negotiations and endless promises, there are still no visible signs of progress for them. The chances of the EU during the Doha round finding any new formula for reducing agricultural subsidies that will satisfy both the French farmers and developing countries seem remote, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, mentioned.
	Yet at the same time the EU is preparing to go ahead with its economic partnership agreements under WTO rules, which, without proper safeguards will directly hurt the ACP countries. That will occur in spite of the assurances in the Cotonou agreement, which was specifically intended to preserve the existing arrangements and protect the most vulnerable countries from globalisation and free trade. That will happen in spite of the laudable efforts of this Government.
	The Commonwealth has called again and again for the phasing out of export subsidies, for the reduction of trade-distorting domestic support, for goods produced in the developed world, and for increasing market access for goods from the developing world. The summit will be a further opportunity for the poorest and least developed countries to press for special and differential treatment, especially those saddled with high export/debt ratios, dependent on one or two commodities, and with no prospect of diversification. It means lower tariff reductions, longer implementation periods of WTO rules, which is very important, and expanded technical assistance and support for individual countries that are adversely affected by loss of trade preferences.
	The UK is in the forefront of those negotiations, not just because of the EU presidency, but because of its position in the world economy and its long track record. It enjoys one of Europe's fastest growing rates of FDI—four times that of Africa, according to the latest UNCTAD report. However, it is precisely because of our experience of developing countries that they are expecting more active support.
	But that is not a foregone conclusion. The DTI and DfID have had some difficulty reconciling free and fair trade. DfID has supported important research into alternatives to economic partnership agreements, such as new generalised system of preferences. I have read the Government's response to the Select Committee report on fair trade and I know that the Government have circulated that research, but do they themselves recommend the revised GSP as the way forward? Will the "Everything But Arms" (EBA) agreement conflict with the EU's plan for regional partnership agreements and greater regional integration among the ACP countries? Will the latest "EBA plus" solution exempt the least-developed countries from reciprocal market access under WTO rules, and how will Her Majesty's Government persuade the EU to get round this? These are questions with which DfID has grappled but have not yet been crystallised or answered by the Commission.
	The EU position is that ACP countries must be encouraged to enter a partnership agreement or a regional partnership agreement, because they are the only WTO-compatible options. The Singapore issues are still on the table, and it seems that even DfID is expecting the most vulnerable countries to fall in line with the key principle of reciprocity. In their response to the fair trade report, the Government accepted that until they entered an "Everything But Arms" agreement, no ACP state should enjoy worse access to the EU than under Cotonou and that the EBA could extend even beyond LDCs. What they cannot accept is that the economic partnership agreement itself is inappropriate for those countries.
	These are complex, technical issues. Winston Cox, the Deputy Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, responsible for development, has warned that these various agreements will overstretch the negotiating capacity of most ACP countries which, he says, urgently need to translate potential gains into actual, practical gains—especially in areas such as agriculture. The "hubs and spokes" projects to train and provide regional trade advisers in this context are one of the best examples of the Commonwealth at work.
	Finally, will the Government give their full backing to plans outlined recently by the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit to encourage more civil society support for the APRM? The Commonwealth stands for all the qualities that we hold most dear in the world. In a dangerous world, not least in Africa, it has an impressive record of achievement that goes back several decades. It already has a close partnership with the European Union and it is improving its links with Francophone countries. That is another important aspect that has not been mentioned. The Commonwealth is the best vehicle for negotiating trade agreements at this time, and for ending the WTO stalemate. We must make the most of it.

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, whose very name has been imprinted on my mind as an island archipelago since an early childhood atlas.
	It is highly imaginative and timeous of my noble friend Lord Freeman to have secured this debate in advance of that unlyrically christened instrument, CHOGM; although the word "chogm" in Malta has the pulse of a powerful marine engine that we must hope will metaphorically eventuate there. In that context, I endorse with enthusiasm my noble friend's thesis that CHOGM should concert a common position in advance of the WTOT "tradefest" in Hong Kong, just as I applaud his anatomisation of the Commonwealth at large.
	Others in your Lordships' House have joined my noble friend in wishing to see us use the Commonwealth's collective history and political geography as a force for practical good in an uncertain world. In the midst of such uncertainty, the stability and familiarity of the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth relationship—I allude to relations between other Commonwealth countries, apart from ourselves—is not only a reassurance but a sure basis for further exploration.
	My own positiveness is rooted in a gap half year after a postgraduate degree at Harvard, whence I returned to London by what are now 16 independent members of the Commonwealth in north America, Australasia, Africa and the oceans. The prime motivation in 1959 was to see those countries before we joined the EEC, whenever that might have been. But that motivation had been stimulated at Oxford through being a rareish British member of the Ralegh club, which for the benefit of the Hansard reporter, is spelt R, A, L, E, G, H. This consisted mainly of Commonwealth Rhodes scholars and met under Chatham House rules on Sunday nights to hear great men speak about the Commonwealth. I recall evenings with Alan Lennox-Boyd, then Colonial Secretary, K M Pannikar and J K Galbraith, whose own origins were Canadian, before he became the American Ambassador in India.
	One of the countries I visited, in the days before Tanganyika and Zanzibar were united, was Tanzania. Last year, I went back with a CPA delegation and I was struck by how the personal relations within the political classes of both countries remain so close and vibrant between us. The index of heads of state in Commonwealth countries, educated in the United Kingdom, took another turn when the Tanzanian Prime Minister reminded our CPA delegation colleague, Mrs Valerie Davey, then Labour MP for Bristol West, that in the mid-1960s she had taught him in Tanzania—rather than in the UK.
	In 1959, in Tanganyika, I visited Bagomoyo on the coast, the town through which some 19th century British explorers of Africa set out on their journeys and through which the body of Livingstone was carried back to the sea. We did not go there last year, but I remember the archaeological investigations occurring there 45 years earlier into Arab buildings, and that prompts my contribution today.
	Other Members of your Lordship's House are picking up the threads of my noble friend Lord Freeman in exploring how the Commonwealth can exploit our mutual past in today's circumstances for political ends. I want to ventilate how we might strengthen and renew the links in cultural ways to reinforce the possibility of political opportunities. I am thinking, in particular, of collaboration to enhance our mutual heritage in the built environment. Of course, there may be exports, like the stone from the quarries of Portland which provide the headstones for all the Commonwealth war graves in the world or the wrought iron which went out as ballast in returning Australian wool clipper ships to make Melbourne, with New Orleans, one of the greatest cities in the world for wrought iron architecture. But I am thinking more of technical services and marketing expertise—only, of course, if they are welcomed—in restoring the Commonwealth's built environment, whether imperial or otherwise, where these are the keys to tourist success, as India has already proved.
	Last night, at the Heritage Counts dinner, I sat next to a senior English Heritage officer who has himself taken 5,000 photographs of colonial architecture. The catalogues of British book auction houses are likewise full of photographs of the imperial past. My own great-grand-uncle who, like a good sapper officer, painted watercolours in the Crimea, was one of the earliest photographers in Mauritius where, in his sapper capacity, he was building the roads, the port, the magistrates court and the prison.
	If we can build a Commonwealth facility, possibly through a charitable vehicle under Commonwealth auspices, to display and to enhance our mutual heritage, we shall not only do economic good, but also increase the knowledge we have of each other and the reasons why the Commonwealth, in the familiar words of 1066 and All That, is a good thing.
	In advancing this cultural salient, I take comfort from cricket, which others have mentioned. This country's particularly salient contributions to global civilisation have lain in political common sense and lyric poetry, which come together in the game of cricket, itself one of the few international sports to have laws rather than rules. It has been one of the binding threads of the Commonwealth, appealing remarkably to a diverse series of national temperaments.
	But above all, we must capitalise on the Commonwealth's capacity for good humour and good-natured debate. At a Commonwealth education ministers' conference in Nicosia in the early 1980s, I once had to defend the British policy of charging full costs for overseas student fees, even if those full costs in an admirably ambiguous British way, were never precisely defined. In intensity of assault, the occasion was a rerun of the action at the mission station at Rorke's Drift, but I shall never forget how good humour made it an enjoyable and not merely a memorable event for myself, in which all of us remained friends.

Baroness Prashar: My Lords, I too am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, for securing this very timely debate and for providing us with an opportunity to debate the UK's relations with the Commonwealth, as the Commonwealth leaders gather for next week's summit in Malta. I enthusiastically support what the noble Lord has said and I want to underline the three areas where action was indicated.
	At the outset, I declare my interest in and my wholehearted commitment to the Commonwealth. In an age of multiple identities, a unifying factor for me has been the Commonwealth. More particularly, I have been a member of the Royal Commonwealth Society and since 2002 a trustee and its chairman. Therefore, my contribution will be mainly about the role of non-governmental organisations or civil society in the Commonwealth.
	I start where eyes are set and that is Malta, where the opening of the Commonwealth People's Forum will precede the start of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at the end of the week. The capacity of non-governmental organisations for connection and for consensus building has always been a particular Commonwealth strength and I very much look forward to being there and seeing it fully utilised in Malta.
	The first area where the Commonwealth can provide movement and partnership is in building on the work of the G8 summit and the recent UN Millennium Summit in reviewing and achieving the millennium development goals and giving fresh impetus to poverty and the development agenda. As has already been said, it is also vital that the Commonwealth prepares to use its significant membership of the WTO because in 1999, Commonwealth leaders meeting in Durban made an important contribution to the world trade agenda and in the same way Malta can provide an effective input into the Hong Kong trade talks due in December this year. In doing so, I hope that they will listen to what comes out of the people's forum.
	Secondly, the previous Commonwealth summit in Abuja in Nigeria was dominated by debate about Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe may have left the Commonwealth but the people of Zimbabwe have not. Commonwealth links endure in a myriad ways, through doctors, journalists, lawyers, academics and so on. Those connections to the people in Zimbabwe continue and we should work for them so that the people of Zimbabwe, in time, can resume their rightful place in the Commonwealth.
	That brings me to the role of Commonwealth NGOs. As I said earlier, next week will provide a unique opportunity for 53 sovereign nations from all parts of the globe, representing a quarter of the world's people, to make a mark on global issues. It will also be a great demonstration of the power and the reach of a Commonwealth civil society. The Commonwealth People's Forum, which will be organised by the Commonwealth Foundation, which I shall be joining next week, is a great gathering of that other dimension of the Commonwealth, the people's Commonwealth. The initiator of the idea of a parallel Commonwealth forum at CHOGM and its first organiser at the Edinburgh summit was, of course, the Royal Commonwealth Society. Issues of extremism, liberty, tolerance, development and information technology will be on the agenda. In all those issues non-governmental organisations can make a significant contribution but often that potential is not always realised.
	I believe that the UK Government can do more and provide leadership in that area within the Commonwealth context to help people improve relations between communities and citizens in this country, as we have already heard through sport, culture and youth activities, which are the obvious channels for that purpose. In my capacity as chair of the Royal Commonwealth Society, I see the work that we carry out in central London where we have led developments on youth CHOGMs where people are given the practical experience of how democracy and the rule of law work in practice. We are developing young people and promoting policy debate and we are ensuring that there is better dialogue, communication and understanding.
	It is sad, and a strange irony, that the Commonwealth is least appreciated and understood in the way that it should be. It is not on the radar screen of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; it is only there when there is a problem, such as with Zimbabwe, but it is never positively promoted. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, is very committed and is keen that this dimension is not just on the radar screen of the FCO but is also on those of other government departments. I hope that she will urge the Government to approach Malta in a positive and optimistic spirit to help that meeting realise its potential and to ensure that it gives the leadership and support that civil society and NGOs require. I hope that the message from this House will be that we do not just work at inter-governmental level, but we also make sure that the people of the Commonwealth connect through civil society activities.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Freeman for bringing this debate to the House today. It has been fascinating to hear from so many noble Lords who have wide ranging knowledge and experience of the Commonwealth. My comments will come from my own direct experience as the only ever Australian woman Member of your Lordships' House. I have been here for more than 24 years. At the beginning, a number of senior Peers said how nice it was to have a colonial Member—a word that was out-of-date even then. There are currently three Australian Members of this House: the noble Lords, Lord May and Lord Broers, and me. I know that the noble Lord, Lord May, is also British, but I do not know the situation of the noble Lord, Lord Broers. I am Australian only, because, until recently, Australia would revoke one's nationality if one applied for citizenship of another country. But this country is so tolerant that it will allow members of the Commonwealth to take part in politics at any level and to stand for election for any office. Unfortunately, the reverse situation does not exist in many Commonwealth countries. It is a great tribute to Britain that this tolerance exists here.
	The Commonwealth is a family of nations spread throughout the world, each responsible for its own affairs, but each closely tied to Britain by more than tradition. In the month of November, we cannot forget the sacrifices made and the lives lost by the Commonwealth in the two World Wars. Other noble Lords have referred to them. A few years ago, I was at a moving remembrance service in Kenya, when tall, stooped old men of the King's African Rifles put down the umbrellas protecting them from the fierce sun to step forward and lay their wreaths. It is more than the old who are moved by the history of what happened in the past and the closeness of Commonwealth countries. Young Australians in ever-increasing numbers go to Gallipoli for the dawn service on Anzac Day. Many young people now join the service at the new Australian War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner.
	In trade, it is not just wine and tourism. Australia and Britain are closely linked, but I do not intend to speak about this, as my noble friend Lord Goodlad, who was a wonderful British high commissioner in Canberra, is next in the list of speakers. When I lived in Sydney—here I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, as I believe we have more cast iron than Melbourne, but there is a great rivalry between those two cities—the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, was then high commissioner. In the 1960s, he was a founder of the Britain-Australia Society, which grows stronger here every year and has a large number of new members.
	Britain has given a parliamentary and legal system to the Commonwealth that has proved to be invaluable. In this year, the less I say about the Ashes, the better. I am afraid that I fail the Tebbit test, so noble Lords can tell what my reaction was. Famous Australian actresses, scientists, businessmen and women have made their names in Britain. Until they received recognition here, they were not really valued in Australia. They include musicians from Nellie Melba to Joan Sutherland, and Charles Mackerras, who is just celebrating his 80th birthday. Australians seem to be everywhere in Britain. I was one of the many thousands of Australian dentists who came to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. I came short-term, but I find myself still here 50 years later. The shared language of the Commonwealth is enormously important. It means that wherever we go in the world, we are able to communicate with people from other parts of the Commonwealth. When one goes to a CPA conference, one feels that there is a great family feeling.
	I will take up the point made by my noble friend Lord Freeman about the computers of this House. I was on the Information Committee, and all computers that have been discontinued for Peers' use are recycled. They go to other parts of the world, largely to the Commonwealth parts of Africa. He need not worry about them being wasted. I would like to see greater medical support from this country, and I know that the Royal College of Physicians is for that. Many poorer countries cannot afford to send people here to train, but we have experts, many from those counties, who would happily go back and give their experience. It is simply a matter of getting agreement on salaries with the National Health Service to allow that to happen. It would be a very good thing.
	The supporters on my coat of arms are a lion and a kangaroo. The British lion holds up the Australian wattle flower and the kangaroo holds up the English rose. I feel that is symbolic about the way most of us feel about the Commonwealth. It is a shared experience. The Commonwealth is a very special group of countries, and the linkage is strong and lasting. I would not underestimate the NGO part of it, which was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar. NGOs do a great deal of good and the Commonwealth will see that their work gets even better.

Lord Goodlad: My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lord Freeman on his wide-ranging and penetrating speech opening this debate. I am very pleased to be following my noble friend Lady Gardner, in whose country I have just spent some very happy years. I join her in saluting the contributions of the Commonwealth in war, not least those of the Australian forces over the years, in defence of the ideals, values and freedoms that we share.
	I join noble Lords in their tributes to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. Over the generations, many friendships have been made and sustained, and values shared and disseminated, in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. In recent years, I have attended seminars in the Jubilee Room of Westminster Hall that have been outstanding for those who participated. I believe that the meetings, particularly those of presiding officers and clerks throughout the world, have been of inestimable value in forwarding the objectives of the Commonwealth.
	In 1998, I had the honour of attending the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association annual conference in New Zealand, and I visited the Solomon Islands on the way—they were a bit behind in their contribution and were ineligible to attend the conference. I was most courteously met at the airport by the Speaker, who said that he had summoned Parliament to hear my address the following day. I turned up first thing in the morning, and was flattered and gratified by the full turnout. It was standing room only. After I had made my hastily put-together speech, I answered a few questions, and then the Speaker adjourned the House for morning tea. My self-satisfaction at having attracted such an enormous turnout was immediately punctured when I saw the magnificence of the morning tea arrayed before us. It went far beyond tea, and even further beyond the morning. It was an example of magnificent, inclusive south sea island hospitality.
	How do the UK's relations with the Commonwealth look from the South Pacific? It is a vast area with more than a dozen small states, all of which are poor and some of which are so low-lying that their existence is threatened by global warming. They are nearly all members of the Commonwealth. In fact, they are more than one-fifth of the total membership. Our bilateral aid budget—£4.5 million per annum—exiguous by Department for International Development standards, is being cut completely. The task is being left to the European Union, whose record in the delivery of aid is perhaps fortunately beyond the scope of this debate. In 1998 there was a proposal—fortunately rejected by Ministers—to close the High Commission in Papua, New Guinea—a poor country, constituting over three-quarters of the land mass of the South Pacific islands, over three-quarters of the population; and where there are substantial British interests.
	However, four high commission closures in the region have recently been announced. They do not, fortunately, include the Solomon Islands. In 2000 the Solomon Islands requested that Australia send some police to help quell the troubles in Guadalcanal. Australia, understandably, refused because the safety of the police could not be guaranteed. It ended up sending a warship, organising an evacuation and a peace conference and now has a large number of police and officials there. There is a lesson here. The so-called arc of insecurity running from East Timor through Papua, New Guinea, where tens of thousands were killed in Bougainville and where there is still great unrest, the Solomon Islands and Fiji, from which British interests are to be pursued in the so-called "hub and spoke" operation, is an example of an area where failing states may well emerge, international organised crime flourish and British and Commonwealth objectives may be seriously damaged.
	In a changing world British resources must be configured to observe changing priorities. I trust that in a region containing over one-fifth of Commonwealth members, where the UK has historically been highly respected, the Government will be vigilant to ensure that there are sufficient resources and that in future they are deployed in a properly planned and co-ordinated fashion.
	The forthcoming CHOGM in Malta will be heavily focused inevitably on WTO issues and terrorism. But there will also be a focus on education. "Education—creating opportunity realising potential" was the theme for the Commonwealth Day celebrations on 14 March this year—"the golden thread", as it has been called, that binds the Commonwealth. As Nelson Mandela said:
	"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world".
	The achievements of most Commonwealth objectives—the promotion of sustainable economic and social development, the alleviation of poverty, fighting communicable diseases, protecting the environment and combating criminal activities all involve access to universal education.
	The Government's flagship policy in this area, endorsed by the Prime Minister and the Commonwealth in 2003, has been the Commonwealth Institute and the Centre for Commonwealth Education at Cambridge under the direction of Professor Colin Colclough. The noble Lord, Lord Desai, referred to this, as did my noble and learned friend Lord Howe in describing the predicament in which that flagship finds itself; namely, adrift.
	Lest your Lordships should be in any doubt as to the strength of feeling in the Commonwealth on this matter, I remind you of the words of the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Don McKinnon, a man of noted moderation and temperance. He said:
	"The UK's decision is selfish imperialism. This scandalous act robs millions of children in the developing world of educational opportunities. By having this white elephant de-listed, the Commonwealth Institute could have realised funds for education programmes for 75 million children in the Commonwealth who have never seen the walls of a classroom. The British Government has missed this opportunity and instead decided to keep the Institute's assets locked in a derelict building—a Millennium Dome of the 1960s—which no one wants, no one needs and serves no purpose whatsoever . . .
	"The Commonwealth has been wholly supportive of the British Government's efforts . . . This decision flies in the face of those efforts and of the UK Government's stated goal to achieve universal primary education by 2015."
	This problem will not be solved by the time of CHOGM, but I hope that a solution will be announced.
	My noble and learned friend said that legislation might be required. Clearly, a Private or Private Member's Bill would not be appropriate. If a government Bill has a sufficiently widely drawn Long Title it could go in that, otherwise there should be a new Bill. I believe that it would have widespread support in this House.
	The respected record of the United Kingdom in Commonwealth matters and our pride in helping the burnishing of the golden thread of education are at stake. I trust that the Leader of the House will reassure us today.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, I join others in warmly thanking my noble friend Lord Freeman for promoting this debate. The timing is very nice. Next week we have the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malta, a country, a state, a nation that I had the pleasure of visiting recently to participate in preparatory discussions on the prospects for CHOGM. That will be a big event in what is admittedly a small island community. We should give them our full support and warm feelings in carrying out that important conference event.
	It has been a stimulating debate, because there is much experience here among your Lordships. I was especially thrilled to hear the voice of Australia coming through strongly in the debate in the contribution from my noble friends Lady Gardner and Lord Goodlad, who returns from a highly successful tour as High Commissioner in Canberra.
	A decade ago, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the other place, which I then had the honour of chairing, issued a very positive and optimistic report about the future role of the Commonwealth. We argued in that report that the Commonwealth was acquiring a new significance in a networked world and that Britain should make much more of its connections and overall Commonwealth potential. We came up with a long string of recommendations and said that there were hard practical reasons for Britain to give much more attention to its Commonwealth links. That was in 1996, just under a decade ago.
	What has happened in that decade? Not much, I fear. Of course, there were a lot of speeches. We were warmly applauded on all sides for our report. The incoming Labour Government produced some fine rhetoric about how they were going to renew our commitment to the Commonwealth. I hope that it does not sound as though I am being world-weary in saying that a great many of the speeches made then are still being today and a great many of the ideas promoted then are still promoted today—some of them in today's debate. The unwelcome truth is that for too many people, the Commonwealth remains a useful talking shop with no particular new role in this turbulent and dangerous world. That applies in particular to the printed media, which have a spasmodic and infrequent interest in the Commonwealth.
	Some things that have happened since that report have been negative. The whole Zimbabwe saga, about which my noble friend Lord Blaker spoke, has settled down now in that Zimbabwe has gone, it has walked out, but it has not been a glorious affair. Coming down to detail, my noble and learned friend Lord Howe rightly raised with such strength and feeling the deplorably negative development of the Commonwealth Institute. He is absolutely correct to do so. What is happening there and how the trustees have been left with no way out is deplorable. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, when she replies, will tell us that the Government will apply their mind to a way forward on that front. Things cannot be left as they are.
	Despite all that striking of a gloomy note looking backwards, the arguments that we advanced 10 years ago for putting the Commonwealth much more at the centre of British foreign and commercial policy are many times stronger than they were in the middle of the previous decade. I should like to share three overriding reasons why that is so.
	First, the Commonwealth is a living network of relations that stretches across all continents—Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas—and across almost all religions in an age when global reach is the essential quality and characteristic needed of our institutions to tackle global problems. In particular, I emphasise the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar: that the Commonwealth is not just what we see on the surface of governmental organisations, it is a vast web of more than 200 non-governmental and sub-governmental organisations creating the sort of network that is relevant to the information age. That does not exist in many of the other institutions that we invented back in the 20th century, which cannot produce that quality.
	Secondly, the Commonwealth happens to be the fastest-growing entity in the world. I do not think that people have quite adjusted to that, but it is growing faster than China and contains at least six of the most dynamic knowledge-driven economies in the world. It is not just a question of raw materials and commodities, it now contains some of the fastest growing economies. As our trade and investment tilt away from Europe, as they are bound to do, towards the rising Asia, as the whole centre of gravity continues to move in the Asian direction, so the whole Commonwealth network becomes infinitely more relevant for us in hard commercial terms, not just symbolic or historic terms, although they stick in people's memories.
	My third reason why we should consider the matter anew is the most significant. The Commonwealth as an institution not only survives but attracts new members—plenty of nations want to join and several have joined in recent years—when the world's other multi-national organisations, designed, as I said, for the 20th century, are, frankly, failing us and in deep trouble. The Commonwealth provides scope for a real North-South dialogue on trade and security matters on equal, rather than patronising terms.
	When we have problems at the UN, with its members at loggerheads over fundamental issues and with severe internal problems to boot when we have the EU apparently "stalled"—I use that word taken from the Prime Minister—or at least becalmed, with sharply divided views among its members on trade liberalisation, security and world affairs; when we see the WTO struggling to avoid deadlock at Doha on farm subsidies with zero help, I am afraid, from some of our European partners; and when those outside existing trade blocs feel increasingly frustrated that their access to the richer markets is still barred in many ways, we begin to realise that there must be better ways forward. I suggest that we turn to the Commonwealth where the scene looks far more positive.
	On the economic side, intra-Commonwealth trade appears to be expanding steadily and intra-Commonwealth investment flows between Commonwealth members, although the statistics are hard to accumulate, also are clearly expanding. More than that, the Commonwealth offers, at least potentially, the kind of forum in which the faster-growing and richer countries, and the poorer and smaller countries, can speak on equal terms, and in which the faiths can sit down and discuss their problems calmly. There are 500 million Muslims in the Commonwealth. I know that there are some backslidings, but almost all Commonwealth members are seriously committed to contributing to global peace and stability rather than pursuing endless vendettas against America, the West, colonialism and all the other shibboleths of yesterday.
	It is time to think about how a more ambitious Commonwealth of nations building on this successful model could become a real force in opening up the world economy and in uniting the more well intentioned and responsible countries on our planet in facing up to all the ugly dangers of the age: terrorism, pariah nations, paralysing poverty, inter-ethnic wars, corruption, rotten governance, and so the list goes on. One is left with the final question: can the Commonwealth rise up to and meet that wider role and more ambitious challenge in its present form?
	There are perhaps ways to move on to a Commonwealth "Mark Two" which could fulfil some of those hopes. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned the idea of closer association between existing Commonwealth and other countries. There is a great deal in that. There are other democracies—countries in the "good guy" camp—which would love to work much more closely with the Commonwealth. I cannot resist mentioning Japan. It is a nation returning to normal country status; it wants to abandon decades of pacifism; and it wants to contribute to global peace and stability in a decisive way and on a scale commensurate with its economic weight, which happens to be colossal, because it produces 13 per cent of the world's GNP.
	If we ponder on the idea of an intimately allied grouping, built on the Commonwealth model, which brought along in association Japan, but included India—the giant awakening—Australasia, which is almost the most dynamic area in the world; the UK, which is also, I am happy to say, extremely dynamic; and a number of other countries, that would be a network of common wealth, interests and power able to speak on friendly, but firm and equal, terms with the American giant, which is so important, and also, of course, to stand up for the common values of justice and democracy in a way that no other international institution currently seems capable of doing.
	The other day a very able and leading commentator, Wolfgang Munchau, at the Financial Times—a super-sympathetic, EU-centric newspaper—described the European Union as,
	"the wrong institutional platform to deal with globalisation".
	Some would say, sadly, the same about the deeply troubled United Nations. Perhaps, as the new century gets under way, there is a gap to be filled in the architecture of our global institutions, or perhaps a Commonwealth "Mark Two" might do the job better.

Lord Fowler: rose to call attention to the current issues concerning public sector and private pensions; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, we welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, to what is his first proper pensions debate. The noble Lord comes from Birmingham, but that is not his only great distinction. I first came across him when I was Secretary of State for Health and he was director of the National Association of Health Authorities, forever issuing disobliging press releases about my policies. I knew that my turn would come.
	He has been out of government for some months following his resignation and I fear that he may not find his new area the best inheritance in Whitehall. Indeed, if they were not such a nice bunch, I would almost suspect that it was the revenge of the Government Whips.
	From this side, we were sorry to say goodbye to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, who has departed from the Front Bench. She was a formidable debater and at times was capable of arguing the most dubious of cases with enormous skill. I know that at this moment she is hurrying from a pensions conference to take part in the debate.
	Also from this side of the House, we are very sorry to say goodbye to my noble friend Lord Higgins, who has done a tremendous service for this party in a whole variety of positions. But obviously we very much welcome in his place the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale.
	I declare an interest in that I was in charge of pensions policy for six years in the Cabinet of my noble friend Lady Thatcher, and I am also a member of the funded House of Commons pension scheme, albeit before the newest, and I think very difficult to defend, accrual rates were introduced.
	I will say one thing for this Government. Over the past eight years, there has been no lack of inquiries, no lack of commissions and, for that matter, no lack of Secretaries of State—we have had four in the past two years—taking a fresh look at the pensions problem. The Government have been rather like a company which has called in consultants but cannot bring itself to do any of the things that they recommend so they bring in more consultants. In the outside world, that process leads to bankruptcy, which is, frankly, just about where pensions policy stands at the moment.
	Back in the heady days of 1997, the Government appointed Frank Field to think the unthinkable and then, a few months later, sacked him. In 2002 and 2003, they published Green and then White Papers on pensions and now, in 2005, as I will show, they reject their own declared policy.
	As for action, the most important step was taken not by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions but by the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he imposed the notorious £5 billion a year pensions tax. His takings from pensions now total something like £40 billion, and that has been one reason why we have seen the collapse of final salary schemes in the private sector, where, we might remember, 80 per cent of the population work.
	But let me be more specific about government pensions policy and examine an area where the Government have direct policy and financial responsibility—that is, public sector pensions and policy on the age of retirement. There is little or no doubt about the demographic trend. The latest government inquiry by the Pensions Commission, headed by the noble Lord, Lord Turner, whom we certainly welcome to this House and whose report we saw today in the Financial Times some weeks ahead of official publication, sets out the position very clearly in its first report. The Executive Summary of that report states:
	"Life expectancy is increasing rapidly and will continue to do so. This is good news. But combined with a forecast low birth rate this will produce a near doubling in the percentage of the population aged 65 years and over between now and 2050, with further increase thereafter".
	That means that the ratio of the over-65s to the working population between the ages of 20 and 64 will increase from 27 per cent today to 48 per cent in 2050. In other words, the working population will have to finance not only their children but also an increasing number of retired people.
	That, of course, is not a new message. Twenty years ago, when I published my own pensions White Paper, I set out the same kind of forecast, although at that time I was challenged by spokesmen of the party opposite, who then wanted a reduction in the retirement age.
	Self-evidently, this demographic trend has a major effect on the Government, who, through the taxpayer, are financing public sector pensions. Many of the big schemes, such as that of the Civil Service and the health service, are unfunded in that they are not backed by marketable assets. They are run on a pay-as-you-go basis, and the taxpayer not only stands behind them but also picks up the bill. What is the size of that unfunded liability? The only disagreement is how vast the liability is. The last official estimate was £460 billion. The estimate of the actuaries Watson Wyatt is almost £700 billion, and the latest estimate from the much respected Institute of Economic Affairs is that it is more than £800 billion.
	My own view is that we would be wise to veer to the estimates of bodies such as the IEA, which has a good track record and no interest in understating the liability. But we can all agree that there is a formidable liability and, as the Turner commission says more generally, unavoidable choices in the policies to be pursued. No one policy will meet all our aspirations for a decent pension system for both men and women in this country—I emphasise "pensions for women" because that is a vitally important area as well—and, at the same time, be just to all our citizens and be afforded. But on one point all the Government's advisers were united: future policy needs to include an increase in the retirement age. The summary to the Turner commission's report stated:
	"Our response to the demographic challenge should include a rise in the average age of retirement",
	and that is confirmed by the reports today. The Government's own White Paper was even more specific on public sector pensions, where the normal retirement age is 60. In their Green Paper they had proposed raising the normal pension age to 65 and in the White Paper they confirmed that policy. They said that all new staff would be recruited on the basis of retiring at 65 and—this is the important point—negotiations would start with existing staff to see on what basis the policy would be applied to them. That was their statement.
	Against the background of the vast unfunded liability, that was entirely sensible. Members of the public sector schemes could look forward to index-linked final salary pensions, which few of those who were financing those pensions could expect. It was entirely reasonable to ask for that. Let us be clear. No one has ever proposed that a man of 58 or 59 years of age would suddenly be told that his retirement age had just been increased to 65, but the plan would be to increase it by steps for staff in their 20s, 30s and 40s and perhaps even by a little for those in their early and mid-50s. That is what the negotiations were intended to be about and the Government said they were determined on that point. The White Paper not only said that explicitly but added:
	"The Government has a responsibility in its role as a large employer to lead the way in addressing the social and economic consequences of demographic change".
	And Mr. Alan Johnson, the Trade and Industry Secretary, said only the day before the final negotiation that the case for raising the retirement age was "irrefutable". He went on:
	"We are healthier, living longer. The problem is that there are fewer people working, funding more people in retirement. For us to say to the private sector, 'You have to work longer and save more money', and to the public sector, 'You stick with your retirement age', is impossible".
	And so how did the Government pursue their leadership role? How did they argue this "irrefutable" case? The answer is that they did neither. The public sector unions rattled their sabres and the Government collapsed.
	It takes quite a lot for the Financial Times, the Daily Mail and the Morning Star to use the same splash headline but they did so on the following day. The Financial Times said:
	"Labour caves in over pensions".
	The Daily Mail said:
	"Labour caves in on public sector pensions",
	and the Morning Star said:
	"Ministers cave in on pensions".
	Only the Morning Star used the phrase in praise of government action, but all three newspapers were right in their analysis. For, although at some stage new employees will be recruited on the basis that their retirement age is 65, all those already in employment, be they in their 20s or 30s, will still have a retirement age of 60 in addition to their indexed final salary pension.
	Lucky them. For in the private sector, final salary schemes are closing, and there is little prospect of new ones being created. And in the private sector, retirement ages are being increased. This does not show a Government leading but a Government abdicating responsibility and taking a decision they know to be both wrong and unjust.
	It is not fashionable in this House to be passionate, let alone on a subject such as pensions. But in my view this ranks as one of the very worst decisions that the Government have ever taken. I will tell your Lordships why I feel so strongly. In pensions policy, there are obvious differences between the parties and those of us who take part in these debates, but there is also a bipartisan aim to improve and settle the position. This is not an area in which we slavishly follow party policies. I supported the pension credit, to slight disgruntlement on my Front Bench, not as a permanent benefit but as a means of helping now those people who did not have the opportunity of building up their own, and my support was quoted by Ministers in the other place. I also believe strongly in people building up a second pension outside the state system. I have always been attracted by the compulsory pension saving scheme in Switzerland, which, again, is not exactly the policy of my party.
	Where are we left now in reaching sensible, agreed reform of pensions? The fact is that our plans have been torpedoed and destroyed by this baleful decision. How can you say to a man or woman in the private sector, "You will work to 65 but your colleagues in the public sector, who may well be better paid, can retire at 60 on a pension you can only dream of and, incidentally, to which you are contributing"? How can you say to the man or woman in the private sector, "We want you to save for your retirement and are even prepared to compel you to save more"? Might they not say, "No way. The state should provide, just as it does with public sector pensions"?
	How on earth can the Prime Minister, as reported today and yesterday, contemplate raising the retirement age generally following the Turner report, having just run away from the decision with the public sector? Frankly, this is a public sector solution for the benefit of the public sector, agreed, I regret to say, by people who have no idea of what is happening in the labour force generally. Worst of all, they have no concept of the damage that they have done and are doing.
	This is a major setback to sensible pension policy in this country. It goes against the advice of the Government's own advisers. It is a further kick in the teeth to the millions of people working in this country who do not have the benefit of an index-linked final salary scheme. Above all, it creates two nations in retirement: a privileged minority, ironically, are supported by a majority who do not have the same benefits.
	It is unjust and it is unfair. It is a policy which must be changed, if not by this Government then by a new one. The position cannot rest where it is.

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope: My Lords, it is a signal pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. As the former chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee I can testify probably better than anyone else in this House to the effectiveness with which, over a period of 20 years, she has been an effective voice for carers. Her speech will repay careful study and it is a pleasure to follow her.
	Like the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, I should declare an interest. I am also a member of the contributory House of Commons pension scheme. I served my apprenticeship on the Standing Committee of the Social Security Bill 1986. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, was a very big cheese in those days. He was in charge of the honourable Member for Braintree, who is now of course the distinguished and noble Lord, Lord Newton. He was also in charge of a new Whip who joined the committee at a later stage who was the honourable Member for Huntingdon, and look what happened to him. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler was a big cheese then and he is a big cheese now.
	I start on a carping note, but I hope that it will be the only one in the next seven minutes. I am very disappointed that the Labour Administration ran away from a proper public debate on pensions at the last election. I believe—and I stand to be corrected—that the Turner commission was set up as a device to park the whole subject so that it would not embarrass Ministers. There is a political argument that says that pensions is such a complicated issue that perhaps the heat and tension of the hustings is not the best place to discuss such a subtly nuanced subject. However, it was a mistake not to deal with such a serious and fundamentally important subject, recognising the amount of ignorance—in the best sense of the word; I do not use it pejoratively—that people have about saving for their retirement. It was a sadly missed opportunity. I cannot help but say that and I feel better now that I have got it off my chest.
	There are now important reasons for ensuring that Ministers do not miss this opportunity. All the demographic and economic trends and requirements for simplification are coming to a head. The moment for decisions is coming. Early next year, the Government will be faced with a signal opportunity to put some of these things right once and for all. If they do not take that opportunity and make proper use of it, we will all pay a price. As the Turner commission makes clear, if we do not get all of this right, we will end up with pensioners, on average, being poorer in future. That would be a tragedy.
	The Turner commission did a valuable service. People think that a lot of new stuff was produced. It brought a lot of good information together and refreshed some of the evidence, but there is huge expertise and a body of knowledge in the industry in this country which was already aware of all these problems. The noble Lord, Lord Turner, brought that to the fore and brought it all together in a helpful way, but no one should think that any of the information was discovered for the first time as a result of his work. Noble Lords who have the time should look at page 173 of the noble Lord's report—that is to show noble Lords that I got as far as page 173 in the first report. Table 5.1 is a wonderful table headed "total personal sector balance sheet". It relates to total housing assets. The rubric at the bottom of the table says that the figures are correct to the nearest £50 billion—the noble Lord, Lord Turner, is no cheapskate. I would love to add my name to a report that had a table of that kind.
	More seriously, one thing about the noble Lord's report that worries me and should worry us all is what has now become known as the funnel of uncertainty in terms of demographic change. He makes it quite clear—he is right—that official figures in the past have been substantially wrong about subsequent developments. The trends are based on best evidence and best judgment—nobody is criticising the GAD and other people who have done the figures—but there is still the real possibility that we could be underestimating the extent of this problem, and it is bad enough as it is.
	The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, is quite right to say that the issue is technically complicated in the delivery and mechanisms, but it boils down to four simple things—pensioners, on average, will be poorer unless taxes go up, retirement ages rise or people save more money. Quintessentially, that is what this issue is all about. Therefore, it would be sensible to do bits of all three to avoid the fourth. In effect, that is what the Turner commission is actively considering. I would be happy to support the idea in the Financial Times leak today—if it is accurate—although I would be much happier if we did not go for realigning S2P and went for a single much more straightforward system of having a basic state pension which was clearly designed not only to be at a level that would guarantee against poverty but also to be a base on which second and third-tier pension provision could be built.
	More than anything else in this debate, if the Minister were my fairy godmother and granted me a single wish, it would be that reform is now essential. No time is left for getting this wrong. The time is right. The system is too complicated. Simplification must be part of the proposal and education and information must also play a part. The long-term goal is clear—we need a higher, simpler, less means-tested pension for us all, which offers a base on which other things can be built.
	The Government should strive to achieve consensus and consensus is out there now—it has been emerging for some time. There is certainly consensus on the broad, outline policy, but it will be harder to get detailed changes and everybody in the same tent on that basis. It is a goal that the Minister should work for as hard as he can.
	I have two other things to say before I sit down. One priority must be the position of women. This reform will fail if it does not address the problem facing women. That is an established view now outside this place, and I hope that the Government will respond to that. Also, we must all start thinking much more positively about retirement after 65. There are ways that the Government can help with that too, but we should use this debate and the opportunities coming in the next weeks and months to promote the idea positively.
	Finally, I believe that the Prime Minister in his Brighton conference speech was right when he said that on some of the reforms that he had made he wished he had gone further. I only hope that in the fullness of time he does not look back on pensions reform and think that he got that wrong by not going far enough when taking the big decisions on pensions later next year.

Lord Desai: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on proposing this debate. I have spoken in previous debates that the noble Lord has introduced on pensions, and I look forward to many more that he will introduce in future.
	I must apologise to the House that I shall not be able to be here at the end, not because of any frivolity but because the House of Lords bridge team faces the marauding hoards of the MCC, and I must be there to defend our honour.
	As an economist, let me lay down a couple of ground rules. In a fundamental paper about 47 years ago, Paul Samuelson, a Nobel prize winner, showed that in all pension schemes the working generations' savings pay for the retired generations' consumptions. How you do it is your choice, but whichever way you do it, that is a fundamental proposition. So in a sense, while we concentrate quite hard on what I would call the stock of assets and the stock of liabilities, eventually it is the flow payments that are important.
	That is for two reasons: first, eventually the payment has to be there, whatever your stock position; secondly, the stock positions are difficult to estimate accurately, especially if they are many years ahead. No more than 15 years ago we were proudly saying how we had the best pension system in the whole world, and we were ahead of everyone else in Europe. Given a stock market slump, the whole situation is reversed.
	We have to be careful in claiming either a big shortfall or a big surplus. If there is a shortfall in private schemes and we make existing firms top up too quickly, that may harm their own viability as ongoing profit-earning firms. We have to be careful not to kill the golden goose. Whatever estimates we have about pension liabilities compared to likely assets must therefore be treated with not just a funnel of uncertainty, but a huge cave of uncertainty.
	Having got that off my chest, I congratulate my noble friend on his new bed of nails. He arrives in this position when not only pensions are a problem, but also welfare reform. This is a great opportunity to link the two subjects. My noble friend Lady Pitkeathley pointed out how a silly rule about overlapping benefits actually has the opposite result from what was originally intended: people who are unable to afford it suffer when they move onto a pension from the carer's allowance.
	What if we think of pensions, not as pensions, but as senior citizen's income? What if we say that every senior citizen—at a cut-off point of 60 or 65, as you like—is entitled to a state income, regardless of their work record or contribution? What if we roll up the secondary means-tested pension along with the basic state pension, pay women as much as men get, and allow people roughly £100 to £110 a week? That is not a great fortune, but it would avoid abysmal poverty for people in old age. If we do that, we should not cancel the carer's allowance, because they have an additional responsibility, not just for looking after themselves, but for caring—which has no retirement age, as my noble friend pointed out. There is all this fuss over the age of 65 or 67, but that is not a choice open to carers. We ought to look after the worst-off people.
	Moving from pensions to senior citizen's income will cost. Every time I get up, I cost the Government another few billion pounds. But this is the time to do it, and, if it is done, welfare reform for other entitlement incomes might become much simpler. We might think about extending the principle of a citizen's income to other entitlements.
	I urge the Government to be cautiously bold in this one respect. If we can do this, at least the danger of poverty would be relieved. As to the retirement age, once again it is hard to forecast how behaviour will change. We are all assuming that in 30 years' time people will behave as they do now, and therefore x, y and z will follow. It is possible, however, that the way people work may change so drastically—working at home might become so much easier—that we may be able to suspend the notion of a retirement age. If we have converted a state pension into a citizen's income that accrues to people regardless of whether or not they are working at a certain age, the pressure to retire at a particular age will become that much less.

Lord Freeman: My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Fowler on not only his speech but also the good fortune of being able to introduce this debate. I agree with his trenchant comments. I declare an interest as chairman of a large industrial final salary pension scheme. I want to concentrate, in the few minutes available, on the problems of final salary schemes in the private sector.
	My noble friend drew the distinction between the plight of those blue-collar and white-collar workers in defined-benefit final salary pension schemes who are finding their schemes in deficit—some of them closing—and the public sector. Public sector schemes include judges, former Members of Parliament who have served long enough to get a full pension, senior civil servants and Bishops, all of whom will benefit from preserved decent final salary schemes. The private sector can in general no longer afford what used to be regarded as the hallmark of good pension provision. Why?
	There are two reasons for this sudden change. First, there was the withdrawal of the benefit of reclaiming advance corporation tax on dividends. We were told at the time by the Government that we were not to worry; this would be compensated for by higher net dividend payments and, implicitly, higher stock market valuations for share prices. That has not happened, and therefore pension funds for defined-benefit final salary schemes have seen a black hole created in pension provision.
	The second reason, which is arguably more important, is that the nation is living longer. The actuarial profession, together with trustees—and I accept my part—can be blamed for not identifying this trend early enough. I plead with the Government Actuary, through the Minister, to ensure that statistics are more up to date. If we are going to continue to live longer, actuarial provisions for pension schemes must take that into account. It is a welcome development, but it has caused a massive problem for private sector pension schemes.
	There are three simple measures of amelioration—the creation of an oxygen tent for private sector defined-benefit pension schemes—which are needed urgently. It may be that a future government will reverse the tax on pension schemes, and I hope they do, but that is unlikely to happen under the present Administration.
	As the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, indicated, many schemes are closed to new entrants. The schemes themselves are therefore maturing by definition, as no new members are entering. This means the trustees must shift their assets from the stock market to the gilt market—the debt market—in order to match liabilities. The Government have so far refused to recognise this, in my judgment, through the issue of substantial index-linked gilts available only to pension funds. I hope the Chancellor will take that into account in his pre-Budget statement, otherwise there will be continued pressure on the stock market, which will affect many people in this country and mean that trustees are unable to match liabilities with assets. That is the first measure.
	The second is that I hope the new pension fund regulator will take a pragmatic view of the substantial deficits that are now prevalent in pension schemes in the private sector, particularly in the manufacturing sector.
	We are talking about 20, 30, 40 or 50 per cent of the market capitalisation of many companies in the Financial Times index of the top 350 companies. When we debated pensions legislation a few years ago, we were told by the Government not to worry as the levy—I seem to remember a figure of £180 million per annum in that regard—upon pension funds to pay pensions to those whose schemes had collapsed or defaulted would be offset by the benefit of reducing the maximum level of indexation of pensions in payment. That has not happened. The cost of the pension fund levy is now several hundred million pounds—several multiples of what was originally estimated—and inflation is below the 2.5 per cent lower cap. It is a recurring problem for many pension funds that have to pay the cost of the levy to the regulator.
	Help is needed in providing more information to those who work in the private sector regarding their potential pension benefits. I give the Government credit for introducing recent changes on that, which are much to be welcomed. However, what people in the private sector really need is a pensions health check at the ages of 30, 40 and 50 to explain what their accrued pension benefits are going to be. If you change jobs and go from a defined benefit scheme into a defined contribution scheme and then into your own personal pension scheme, it is difficult to calculate what your future benefits will be. We need Stelios to introduce some kind of easyPension benefit calculation, available on the Internet so that you can feed in the information—which is available from your pension fund's trustees—and obtain an aggregate figure. The private sector is in crisis and help is needed.

Baroness Turner of Camden: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for giving us this opportunity to debate pensions. I welcome my noble friend Lord Hunt to the first major debate on pensions to which he will reply. He has a hard act to follow as we all recognise that my noble friend Lady Hollis was expert at handling her brief. However, I am sure that my noble friend Lord Hunt will do extremely well.
	There has been much talk about a pensions crisis. While it may not be appropriate to describe the present situation as a complete crisis, there could well be a crisis in the future if nothing is done. Nevertheless some people today are facing acute problems because of the failure of the companies they work for and the consequent collapse of pension provision. In my years as a trade union official I was always keen to get members into final salary schemes. Indeed, such schemes were largely regarded as one of the major success stories of the previous century. For many people they have been an enormous success, enabling them to lead retirements free of financial anxiety. We did not, of course, envisage the collapse of the stock market several years ago, nor the bankruptcy of a number of major firms, leading to the disappearance of pension provision to which their employees had contributed believing their investment to be totally safe.
	I agree that the Government's decision on tax in relation to ACT did not help very much. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, about the Government's recent decision on public sector pension provision because all the Government seem to me to be doing are honouring existing contracts and offering different contracts to new employees. That, of course, happens all the time in the private sector.
	The Government have attempted to deal with some of the problems in their recent pensions legislation, a key element of which was the new Pension Protection Fund designed to provide compensation for employees caught in this situation. It did not at the time deal with the problems of employees who had already lost out, but some steps have been taken via the introduction of another fund to cope with those caught in the gap. I certainly supported all those moves but the major concern is that there may not be enough resources available in the funds to deal with all the problems that could arise. We also have a new pensions regulator with much wider powers than existed for OPRA. The Government are to be applauded on the steps they have taken to cope with that unfortunate situation. However, as many speakers have said, the problem remains the overall one that we have an ageing population. We are all living longer—which should be celebrated—but we may not be saving enough as a community, either individually or communally, via the tax system to provide adequately for future generations when they retire.
	The trade unions support occupational pension schemes, which they believe should be brought about as a result of negotiation between unions and employers, but think that there should be a system of compulsory contributions. The report of the TUC's pensions task group recommends that contribution rates should be set initially at 6 per cent of all pensionable earnings in excess of £6,000 per annum, with a longer term target of 15 per cent. It proposes a 2:1 split in employer and employee contributions. There will no doubt be an opportunity for further discussion of this and other suggestions when we get the much awaited Turner report. I think, however, that compulsory contributions will be difficult to sell to the workforce unless there is more confidence in private occupational provision. People obviously will want to feel that their savings are safe. The Government have clearly realised that and hence we have the Pension Protection Fund and the financial assistance fund.
	However, most commentators on private pensions regard the state system as being the bedrock of pension provision. It has long been my view that the basic state pension should be substantially improved, and then increased regularly in line with the wages index. The Government have sought to deal with pensioner poverty through the introduction of the pensions credit. This has had the effect of lifting more than 3 million pensioners out of penury, but there is one drawback in my view—it depends on means testing. As a result it is expensive to administer and many very vulnerable people do not succeed in getting it at all. They do not receive it even though the Government have made a commendable effort to publicise it. Nevertheless it does not reach all those who are entitled to it. I still think that improving the basic state pension for everyone is the best solution. The Government's fear that the money would go to pensioners who do not really need it can be met via the taxation system, as it is already—the better off would simply pay a little more tax, but pensioners would get the money as of right without having to make a case that they were poor enough to need it.
	Probably the poorest group of pensioners are women. I am glad that the Government appear to be giving a lot of attention to the position of women. I am particularly glad that the DWP document, Women and Pensions, has been produced. Although it does not offer any solutions, it sets out some of the problems with a great deal of clarity. The problems are ones with which we are all familiar. In a contributory system—which is what the state system is—women often have an interrupted record because they take time out of the labour market to care for children and often elderly or disabled relatives.
	Despite home responsibilities protection, which gives some cover for years spent caring for others, women often still do not qualify for the full state pension. About 30 per cent reaching the age of 60 do not qualify for the full state pension. The problem is even greater for women from ethnic minorities, particularly those with a Pakistani or Bangladeshi background, as for cultural reasons many of them spend a great deal of time out of the workforce and therefore do not make contributions.
	This very excellent report sets out the problems, although no solutions are offered. There is, however, a case for looking at the possibility of a citizen's pension based on residence in this country rather than a contribution record. Of course, it would be rather difficult to introduce because something would need to be done in relation to those who had contributed and would obviously feel that their contributions should count for something. On the other hand, society may be changing very rapidly with almost all women involved in working for wages outside the home and men allowed more time off to participate in child support. It will be interesting to see whether the Turner report offers some solutions to those admittedly rather difficult and complex problems. I have found this debate extremely interesting and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for introducing it.

Lord Hunt of Wirral: My Lords, I declare an interest in this subject as chairman of the financial services division of Beachcroft Wansbroughs. I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, to the Government Front Bench. Once again, we are greatly indebted to my noble friend Lord Fowler for giving us this vital opportunity to discuss this important subject again. Listening to the speeches so far, I am greatly heartened by the potential for a consensus both within parties and between parties about the nature of the challenge that we face. I hope that the Government's response to the Turner commission will be well considered, brave and also—if it is in any way possible—underpinned by that broad, cross-party consensus.
	However, there is excessive complexity in the market and confusion in the minds of the public. It inevitably starts with the lack of clarity about the one area of the pensions maze with which we are all involved; namely what the state will provide. I am not implying for one moment that it is easy to provide guarantees about what the hard-pressed taxpayer will be able to provide in 2050 or even 2015; yet it is incredibly difficult for citizens to make rational decisions about those important matters if there is substantial and widespread uncertainty. The nature and extent of state provision in the longer term are the Alpha and Omega of this debate; all else flows from them. That is the main reason for turning this into a cross-party matter rather than one forced to exist under the cloud of partisan debates. Otherwise, how on earth can citizens make the necessary decisions about the situations that they are likely to face in 20, 30 or 40 years' time? The situation of course is made far worse by complex products and complicated tax rules. All of that threatens to obscure the one, all-important fact; it does pay to save.
	Looking at this morning's press reports, I offer one word of caution. Whether it is due to the commission or to the journalists' embellishment, there is a serious danger of not comparing like with like. Press reports suggest that BritSaver, as it seems to have been dubbed—the nationalised pension savings plan to be more accurate—would cost 0.2 per cent, while personal pensions cost 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent. That is a gross oversimplification; one of those includes the cost of advice and the other does not. BritSaver does not make the need for advice go away; the cost has to be included somewhere. Moreover, the true costs of large occupational schemes and group personal pension schemes are actually very similar; a figure of 0.4 to 0.5 per cent might reasonably cover both. I hope that we do not make important changes to the way society provides for its retirement on the basis of misleading and partial figures; we will need to get to the bottom of that.
	As I pointed out, the principal role of the state must remain the prevention and alleviation of poverty. That surely requires a simplification of the state pension. Please would the state remove significant complexity from that provision? That would enable those consumers who can afford to save to see more clearly what steps they need to take if they aspire to a more comfortable standard of living in retirement. The state must encourage people to save on top of what the taxpayer is able to provide. The incentive must be strong, clear and unambiguous. That is why the system of tax relief on pension contributions is so important, and also why it is essential for the state to ensure that the system of regulation allows the private sector to flourish to the benefit of all.
	I shall give some tests by which we should judge the Government's response to the forthcoming Turner report. First, how many more people will end up with sufficient retirement saving? According to the DWP, 12 million people are undersaving or not saving at all at present. The noble Lord, Lord Turner, apparently concludes that sufficiency for a high/average/lower earner means a retirement income that replaces 50 per cent /67 per cent /80 per cent, respectively, of pre-retirement earnings, which seems to me a reasonable thumb-rule. Lifting people off means-testing is worthwhile, but on its own it will not enable most to meet their aspirations for their retirement; that will require bold policy. Future generations will pay if the Government duck big decisions for tomorrow for fear of angering businesses and voters today.
	Secondly, we should ask, as other noble Lords have already, what the proposals do for specific underpensioned groups, such as women, carers and self-employed people. Thirdly, we should be asking whether workplace pension provision will be revitalised. There is clear evidence and consensus that the link between working and saving for retirement should be exploited, not diluted. I would like to see targeted incentives to encourage employers to contribute to workers' pensions, tailored to reflect the fact that we cannot expect the same kind of behaviour from small and medium-sized enterprises and self-employed people as we might expect to see on the part of larger firms. Radical and urgent action in this area is desperately needed.
	Fourthly, we should be asking whether the people of this country will engage much more positively with the proposition that they need to plan for the future. The people of this country need to change their behaviour fundamentally, and it goes without saying that there must be a limit to compulsion. Unless citizens of their own free will begin to defer a significantly higher proportion of their consumption, we simply cannot sort this problem out. That is why we need a Government and industry partnership for consumer engagement, based on sustained awareness-raising campaigns.

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: My Lords, I too add my thanks to my noble friend for giving us a chance to debate this important topic this afternoon. I declare an interest as a trustee of two final salary schemes; I am chairman of trustees in one case. Both are now closed to new entrants. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, that they have been closed not because of what the Conservative government did, but because of what the Labour Administration have done, for reasons that I shall explain in a minute.
	Clearly the key challenge faced by pension funding is the question of increased longevity. That can be demonstrated from my own experience. When I became chairman of one of the boards of trustees five years ago, according to the Government Actuary a man aged 65 could expect to live until he was 81.2 years old on average. Now he expects to live to 84.6 years. That is an increase of 3.4 years in life expectancy over the five years. That may be only 4.2 per cent of his total life, but it is 21 per cent of his pensionable life. Any fund offering a defined benefit linked to a final salary would face considerable challenges. That is not the Government's fault in any way. That said, the Government's actions in the interim have, in almost every way, made a difficult position worse. My noble friends Lord Freeman and Lord Fowler have already talked about the raid on the pension funds. I shall say no more, other than to draw the Government's attention to Ernst & Young's study, which suggests that income guaranteed by investments has been reduced by 18 per cent as a result of the Chancellor's actions.
	Much worse than that has been the way in which the Government have been reluctant to spell out and face the realities of the situation that we face. That has damaged confidence, which is such an essential ingredient of long-term savings. Instead, the Government have fallen back on a round of consultation, interspersed or filling up the gaps while consultation takes place with what can be described only as a subtle approach to the blame game. First in line to be blamed are, of course, the employers. We now have a massive Pensions Act and an associated large regulatory burden. As I foreshadowed in my speech on the then Bill's Second Reading, that is the death knell of final salary pension schemes. What company will want to look for and accept an open-ended obligation implicit in such a scheme? It is not only the question of longevity to which I have referred, but the powers of the Pensions Regulator as regards the level of contributions to the fund and of levies to the Pension Protection Fund itself.
	One of the schemes of which I am a trustee is a smallish scheme, with £25 million to £30 million under management. It is a mature scheme. Our income from our employer is £750,000 a year. We are just being told that our assessment for the annual contribution to the Pension Protection Fund may be as much as £600,000 a year. That is our entire income swallowed up, pretty much, in one fell swoop. What does a sensible trustee do when faced with that problem? From the company's point of view, all this open-ended obligation has a deleterious impact on the value attributed to any company if it were to be bought or merge with another company.
	There are difficulties for trustees, for who would be a trustee in those circumstances? Not me, for one. By 15 February, I am glad to say that I shall be history on both the schemes of which I am currently a trustee. My final decision to leave has been triggered by a case where we are, as trustees, in danger of being sued by a husband and wife. No one suggests that we are not paying out the right amount of money; it is a question of to whom we pay it. Under the new regulations, the issue of marital breakdown is controversial and not entirely clear in law. Therefore, both sides are saying that we should be paying the money in different proportions for each. I am a pension fund trustee, not a matrimonial adviser. So I and others will wish to cease to be trustees. Does that matter much? Maybe it does not. But there will be professional trustees in our place. That will incur increased costs, because those people must be paid and their tendency will be to sail in the middle of the convoy. There will be no readiness to break the mould, to avoid accepting the received wisdom of the moment, and in many cases they will not be particularly knowledgeable about the individual fund for which they will be trustees.
	So there is much to be said for the continuation of the defined benefit fund, and I am sad that the Government have done so much to undermine confidence in it. If the employers are not at fault, the Government try to blame the actuaries; they have tried to blame the industry and there had been a tendency to blame individuals by saying that they should save more. If you increase the tax burden, savings will certainly drop. The Government may have avoided headline increases in certain taxes, but the cumulative impact of stealth tax increases has reduced the readiness of people to save. The complexity of new measures is another issue to which many noble Lords have referred, in particular the persistent refusal to be user friendly and consider flexibility in annuity retirement dates.
	So much for the blame game. The worst thing that the Government have done, as my noble friend said, was in their own dealings with public sector pensions. On Wednesday, 19 October, a headline in the Financial Times stated:
	"Abject surrender over public sector pensions".
	The article concluded:
	"This surrender of a policy with an unassailable rationale is typical of Tony Blair's government—for all his claims he wished he had been more radical with previous reforms. It will also be the death knell of public sector pensions in the longer term, since sooner or later a government will have to have the nerve to halt an increasingly costly gravy train for a minority of the workforce that is paid for by the majority".
	The Government have to face up to that issue and my noble friend has done the House a great service by drawing our attention to it.

Lord Lea of Crondall: My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath in taking up his role and thank my noble friend Lady Hollis of Heigham on her splendid work in government over a number of years.
	Debates such as this do not always enhance the search for consensus that was called for by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, but it is the right message to give in advance of Adair Turner's report. After all, debates about pensions have one thing in common with debates about nuclear power stations: the years that we are talking about often relate to 2040 or 2060. It is not tomorrow or the next day, and the leak in today's Financial Times about increasing the retirement age to 67 mentions the year 2020. That is tomorrow in the world of pensions.
	We are not unique in this country in having a problem. There are some dramatic figures on the support ratio. Our ratio in 1948 was five workers for every person who was retired; today that figure is three and will move to two by the middle of the century. In South Korea, that figure will fall from 9.1 today to 1.7 in 2050. In China, it will fall from 8.8 to 2.4. Those figures have been provided by the same sources that we have to believe in all such statistical questions, but we should bear the figures in mind when we consider that we may have a crisis—not today but, as with many other countries, we are at the benign end of the spectrum.
	The fundamental problem of pensions was characterised recently by the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, who said that people want something without having to pay for it. That may be a "square one" remark, but it is fundamentally true. That is why what we often call compulsion is another way of saying that we have to take decisions collectively, not only for the common good but because, left to ourselves, as my noble friend Lady Turner said, there is a lack of confidence in how to take these decisions ourselves. That is because, among other things, we lack confidence in what we have been sold by the financial services industry—although my noble friend did not put it that way. I am in favour of a mongrel, collective, public/private solution and I believe that Adair Turner and his two colleagues, my trade union friends Jeannie Drake and Professor John Hills, are the best people to give us a road map.
	On compulsion, a point that has not been discussed, but which I believe is essential, is how much employers want to employ older workers. We seem to be debating this subject in an abstract world in which people want to employ those aged 67, 68 and 69. Over the years, I have been involved in Third Age Employment Network. Anyone in the House who has been so involved knows that that is far from the case. Next year will be a very important year because we shall have the EU framework of anti-discrimination legislation and it will be important that both sides of industry find a way to get that up and running.
	The kindest way to describe the preaching from some employers, especially when one considers their record of dismissing older workers and not wanting to employ older workers, is that it is schizophrenic. In many cases, they want to sack people when they want to and yet they want to preach about later retirement. Apropos the stronger messages from the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, about the Civil Service, it was only in recent years that the Civil Service employers wanted staff to reduce their retirement age from 65 to 60. That was not from altruism; they would save on the average pension that would be payable, given the turnover in the Civil Service.
	I believe the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, referred to the privileged minority, although he did not use that exact phrase. If I were to ask Members of the House what was the average Civil Service pension in the past financial year, they might think it was £10,000, £8,000, £6,000, or £4,000. It was £2,000. Although the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made some very good points, there is a caricature of those at the top end of the Civil Service on the gravy train, but that will not be recognised by most people in the Civil Service.

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, before we hear from the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, perhaps I can say that many noble Lords are straying into the eighth minute, creating a time problem. That means that we shall not be able to hear my noble friend Lord Hunt speak at the length, as we would wish, at the end of the debate. Perhaps noble Lords could bring their remarks to a close as the figure seven appears on the clock.

Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Fowler for introducing the debate. The Motion refers specifically to both public sector and private pensions. That is entirely apposite given the very different conditions of the two categories. Of course, what they have in common is massive underfunding, but the difference between the two is that the vast majority of members of public sector schemes continue to enjoy final salary-linked, inflation-adjusted, defined-benefit pensions, whereas most active members of private sector schemes no longer enjoy those benefits and have to make do with the vastly inferior money-purchase schemes.
	Furthermore, under this Government, the percentage of the workforce employed in the public sector has increased to more than one in four and continues to increase. The productive private sector and the taxpayers will have to pay the generous public sector pensions. That will represent a steadily increasing burden in future years. I agree entirely with what my noble friend said about the Government's deplorable decision to abandon their long-held intention to increase the normal retirement age for public sector workers from 60 to 65. On the other hand, the private sector workforce is told that it must work longer and put more money into its pension pots. Indeed, it is reported today that the Pensions Commission is shortly to recommend the raising of the state pension age to 67.
	In 1997, our pension system was the envy of the world. Pensions are, for most people, the most important element of savings. This Government have attacked both pensions and individual saving schemes. I concede that pensions policy is not an easy area, but most of this Government's actions have either caused serious harm, such as the removal of pension funds' privileged tax status, as referred to by my noble friends Lord Fowler and Lord Freeman, or have made an already over-complicated system even more cumbersome and expensive. The levies payable to the PPF under the Pensions Act may, paradoxically, result in more companies going bankrupt. The financial assistance scheme is, and was always going to be, woefully inadequate. The stakeholder pension scheme introduced in 2001 is largely a failure. Most recently, the new provisions regarding SIPS will give help where it is least needed and are likely to distort the housing market, putting the acquisition of reasonably priced housing out of the reach of many young people eager to get on the housing ladder.
	I return to the subject of the taxation of pension funds, already mentioned by my noble friends. In the past, pension funds have perfectly logically enjoyed a privileged status in that they were able to receive dividends from UK companies gross; that is to say, UK companies could effectively pay dividends to them without the deduction of corporation tax. The Government changed that with the Chancellor's decision in 1997 to abolish dividend tax credits. That was the notorious stealth tax, so called because it was not at all clear what the Government were up to, as very few people understood the system. I was interested to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, accept that that act was probably not helpful.
	The Chancellor got it badly wrong. He mistakenly believed that he could increase the tax on pension funds by as much as £5 billion a year without endangering the system. As the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants—to which I believe the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, belongs—has stated,
	"the withdrawal of the tax credit is, in our view, the most important single contributory factor to the problems that currently afflict schemes".
	The noble Lord, Lord Young, reminded us that companies have benefited from the reduction in the level of corporation tax, but he omitted to mention that the vast majority of that reduction was implemented by Conservative governments. Killik & Co, the private client stockbroker, has estimated that the Chancellor's stealth-tax raid destroyed around £300 billion of stock market value.
	I believe that the cost of the Chancellor's raid is rather more than the £40 billion to which my noble friend Lord Fowler referred because we should consider its cumulative effects. We can assume that some 50 per cent of the stolen tax credits would have been reinvested in UK equities, yielding perhaps 3.25 per cent per annum. Taking that into account, the cost of the Chancellor's stealth-tax raid to pension funds rises to £56.6 billion. Secondly, we should also consider the fact that our stock market would today be much higher than it is if pension fund managers had not significantly reduced their weightings in UK equities as a result of the stealth-tax raid. This is the reason why, in spite of our relatively good economic performance, our stock market has massively underperformed in relation to the average of the American, German and French stock markets. If the UK stock market had performed in line with the average of those three markets, our corporate pension fund assets would be worth an additional £110 billion, which together with the £56.6 billion I mentioned, amounts to £166 billion.
	I fear that the Chancellor made a huge miscalculation in his stealth-tax raid. Its cumulative effects, coupled with his other tax increases and the imposition of an increasingly expensive and bureaucratic regulatory and compliance regime, have undoubtedly harmed the economy and weakened our competitive position as an attractive financial centre. It is very likely that the stealth-tax raid actually resulted in a substantial net loss to the Exchequer because it has had such a huge negative effect on corporate earnings, on the level of the stock market and on tax receipts.
	As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, rightly said, there is no more time to get this right. I believe the two most important things that the Government must do are, first, to reverse their decision not to increase the retirement age for current public sector employees and, secondly, to restore the completely logical, and now badly needed, privileged tax status for pension funds. Once again, I thank my noble friend Lord Fowler for introducing this interesting debate and giving me this opportunity to speak today.

Lord Rosser: My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on securing the debate on this major issue. While, as has already been said, real progress has been made in the Government's provision for pensioners through the state pension and pension credit, the same has not been the case with some other parties. Some companies, to their credit, have maintained their final-salary occupational pension schemes, sometimes with some changes, and have not joined the, at times, lemming-like rush either to bar entry to such schemes to new entrants or, in some instances, to seek to change the arrangements for future years of service for existing employees as well.
	The move away from final-salary schemes had started prior to 1997, as some companies sought either to obtain a competitive advantage or to restore a competitive position, and chose to do it by reducing the costs of their pension scheme arrangements. One common feature of the move away from final-salary schemes to defined-contribution schemes was that it reduced a company's costs, sometimes significantly, almost immediately, and was not even a case of adopting measures to contain pension costs at current levels. The same changes in pension arrangements, needless to say, do not seem to have been imposed with the same rigour on occupants of the boardroom as well. Leadership obviously has its limits.
	The difficulty is that, once some companies choose to reduce costs by cutting the amount of money they provide for the pensions of their employees to achieve or restore a competitive advantage, other companies will be more likely to follow to keep their competitive position. In other words, there is a snowball effect, with only those companies that take a rather more enlightened, longer-term view of the situation and the value to them of a decent pension scheme for their employees standing firm against the trend.
	Another feature of many companies' approach to the running of their pension schemes is the enthusiasm with which they embraced the short-term attraction of pension fund contribution holidays, particularly for themselves, although not so often for their employees. Many companies and their expert financial advisers, in their projections, chose not to take proper heed of increasing life expectancy and their own warnings that the value of shares can go down as well as up, as can dividends and interest rates. A lack of financial acumen was equally shown by the life assurance companies, resulting in high and unsustainable final bonuses, which have had to be slashed dramatically in the past few years to compensate, to the detriment of those whose policies have recently matured.
	We were also told that a change in accounting arrangements had adverse effects on final-salary occupational pension schemes as far as the balance sheet was concerned. Obviously though, it was not such an adverse effect that all companies concluded that they had to move away from final-salary schemes.
	As we know, the most widely advanced explanation of the move away from final-salary schemes has been tax changes by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, bearing in mind that the move away from final-salary schemes had started before 1997, that it was inevitably going to have a snowball effect once it started as other companies sought to maintain or restore their competitive position, and that contribution holidays by companies continued after the tax changes, that explanation is less than convincing.
	I appreciate that my noble friend will almost certainly say that we must await the second and final report of the Pensions Commission, but I hope that serious consideration will be given to a requirement for companies to contribute a minimum percentage amount to providing pensions for their employees. I say that not just in the context of the approach of some companies in moving away from final-salary schemes, but also in the context of the all-too-large number of companies that have never sought to provide for, or contribute towards, pensions for their staff. All too often those staff have also been doing the least well paid jobs, and are those for whom financial provision and security in their later years is a major worry.
	If companies want to give examples of their social responsibility, proper pension provision for their employees is one way. To opt out or never to have opted in is to transfer all responsibility for providing financial security above the state pension in later years from those who have financial resources—namely, companies and those who own them—to those who, all too often, do not, namely the individual employee.
	It is because I believe that an employer should contribute towards an adequate pension and should not change the rules adversely for existing staff that I welcome the Government's decision on public sector pensions. You do not measure the success of a negotiation simply on the basis of whether you achieve your opening position. The Government's agreement is in line with the more enlightened private sector firms, in that it increases the pensionable age for new entrants but protects the position of existing staff. I do not disagree with the decision that the pensionable age must be adjusted and that more flexible options should be provided for people to work longer if they so wish, to reflect the fact that life expectancy has increased and will continue to increase.
	The Government's decision on public sector pensions has of course been criticised by some highly paid national newspaper editors and business leaders who are on highly attractive remuneration and retirement packages. There is a word to describe people like that, but I shall refrain from using it. The reality is that a large percentage of people in the public sector are by no stretch of the imagination well paid and those at the top end of the pay structure receive nowhere near the remuneration package of their counterparts in the private sector.
	Finally, in the field of pension provision, the Government and the private sector, including the private sector pension companies, must continue to work together if we are to provide greater financial security for people in their later years. The need to encourage more saving for retirement is clear and further measures to provide that encouragement may well be needed. However, I hope that the Government will be as challenging and robust in that relationship as the private sector is with government. The mis-selling of pensions scandal of a few years ago—it was a scandal for which those responsible for the mis-selling have never been properly held accountable—arose because the Government at the time were too trusting of a pensions industry that was badly let down by the activities of some of its number. I trust that no government in future will be quite so starry-eyed again in their necessary and, it is to be hoped, mutually beneficial working relationship with the private sector over pension provision arrangements.

Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, first, I profoundly apologise to the House for not being present at the beginning of the debate. I was unavoidably committed to speaking at the National Association of Pension Funds conference. I regret it the more because I have obviously missed some extraordinarily fascinating speeches. For those who have said kind things about me in my absence, it is clear that I should be absent more often. Thank you.
	I want to start by talking about a woman whom I met called Brenda, because I want to talk about women's pensions. I was having jabs for travel in a private clinic last week and Brenda asked me what I was working on. I said, "Pensions". "Oh", she said, "my pension is not worth ninepence". I said, "How come?" She said—she was fairly knowledgeable—"Well, I have had three children, so I get that HRP thing, but I have been in this job for 15 years but it will not get me any national insurance contributions". I said, "Why not?" She said: "I work for 15 hours a week and my employer will not increase the hours, but, in any case, I job share and have to be available the rest of the week in case the other person cannot turn up". Then she said: "In any case, my mum is getting a bit frail so I need to be around for her and I like the job".
	It meant that, at 57, she was going into retirement without a penny of basic state pension—her HRP is worthless because she had worked below the LEL—and not a penny of occupational pension. As far as I could tell between jabs, at every stage in her life she had made a decision that we would all applaud, but neither her waged work nor her unwaged work were recognised. By making those decent decisions at each stage, she had taken a pension hit.
	Let me invent a mythical twin brother called Brian, who, equally, had married, had three children, was possibly divorced and re-partnered and had a frail mum. Not one of those events in his life would have stopped him working or affected his pension, although they may have made him miserable. He would have worked full time and built up a full-time pension.
	In the minutes given me today, I want to make three propositions. The first is that unwaged work is as valuable as waged work. I know that my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley will have expressed that far more eloquently than I could; but Brenda, therefore, should have had a pension in her own right. Instead, we have a contributory system which is based on rights and responsibilities—something for something. But that is a myth because only 60 per cent of contributory years are paid for; the rest are credits. The result is that we get a system which, if you understand it, is complex and if you do not, is riddled with anomalies.
	Yes, people get something for something, but, equally, many people get something for nothing: for example, a well-to-do man retiring at 60 years old gets five years of free contributions, which he may not need; a married woman will get a 60 per cent contribution from her husband's pension, whether she has children or whether she has worked. So they get something for nothing. Equally, there are those who get nothing for something—like Brenda. They may have run together two caring jobs of 20 hours each, but they get nothing. They may have done three cleaning jobs at 15 hours each, but they get nothing. The difference of course between the something-for-nothing and the nothing-for-something groups is that the something-for-nothing group is relatively well-to-do—and often men—and the nothing-for-something group is usually poorer, hardworking women who have been knocked always round the system. We could all list additional anomalies—just do not tempt me.
	My second proposition is that one would expect that if women have a shortfall in their basic state pension—as Brenda certainly would—they should be able to overcome it by rectifying it through an occupational pension. Yet, if Brenda had had a basic state pension of £50 a week and had put aside perhaps £8,000 savings into a pension pot to give her a private pension of £30 a week, she would have been not one penny better off than if she had not saved at all. The basic state pension, far from underpinning her second pension, would have undermined it. That is the system that we have constructed.
	My third proposition is—even if Brenda had got an occupational pension—to think about the characteristics that an occupational pension demands from women. They must save early from, say, 25 to 30 years old, just the time when they are likely to have children. They should save enough—15 per cent—yet that is the time when they have probably got a mortgage. They should save steadily, but they are likely to be interrupted by their caring responsibilities. And it is advised that women should get an employer's contribution—but women are far more likely to be in part-time jobs or in jobs where there is no pension attached. They should be able to do that for 35 years—come divorce, disaster or whatever happens in their personal lives. At the end of all that, they are told, they would have a return that is worth having—even though, as I have tried to argue, an incomplete basic state pension subverts the very pensions that they are trying to build. That is before I get to means-testing. On top of that, I would ask that they also hope for a return that will, given the stock markets, be on their side.
	Given all those risks and conditions that women cannot meet—certainty, saving enough, saving continuously for 35 years and not touching savings whatever happens—how many men, if they were lower paid women in their 20s or 30s, would risk saving for an occupational pension, when they would not know whether it was worth having until the day after they retired? What sort of incentive is it to tell women to support themselves and to go into retirement with an adequate income when the basic state pension does not recognise their waged or unwaged work, when the interface between their basic state pension and their occupational pension undermines each, and when the very characteristics of the occupational pension scheme are devised for full-time work, not waged work, and not for the sort of life that Brenda will lead.
	It is as though we have set up—this is the sort of thing economists talk about—a game of snakes and ladders, in which Brian, as he goes around the board, will hit all the ladders—promotion, a new employer, a bonus—and Brenda, when she has a child, if anyone becomes ill or she takes on a caring responsibility, hits all the snakes. No sane public policy would develop a system in which what the state wants women to do—to work full time—is at odds with what women themselves and society want—for women to be able to work part time. We should recognise that part-time work is a resource for our society and that women should not be berated for doing it.
	I conclude by asking my noble friend not to tell us that things will be fine in 20 years' time because, arguing on the Henry Higgins principle of, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?", in 20 years' time they will be. That will not do because as women live longer, those caring responsibilities will increase rather than decrease. Moreover, I want men as well as women to be able to make the same sort of choices, balancing their work, their lives and their pension provision. So I hope that in the debate and arguments around Turner, we put the needs of two-thirds of our pensioners—women—at the forefront of the debate. I hope that all noble Lords will agree.

Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay: My Lords, I am happy to join with the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, both personally and on behalf of these Benches, in his tributes to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, and the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, and welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. We have just heard in the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, what a doughty fighter she is for women and what a loss she is to the Front Bench.
	Although the noble Baroness did not put it in terms in her remarks, one can deduce from her speech that she was one of four Labour speakers in the debate, in addition to the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, who has argued for a much higher basic state pension, particularly to help women. I include in that group, of course, my noble friend Lord Kirkwood. As we approach the Turner report, that is a powerful message which reflects the developing strength of the case on the other side of the House; indeed, in all quarters. My noble friend Lord Kirkwood certainly made an excellent and concise argument for a high, non means-tested basic state pension so as to aid women. We have also heard powerful speeches from three Conservative former Cabinet Ministers. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, was on his usual coruscating form, if I may say, and as noble Lords will hear when I develop my arguments on public sector pensions, I agree with much of what he said. I refer also to the noble Lords, Lord Freeman, Lord Hodgson and Lord Hunt of Wirral, who all gave us insightful and powerful descriptions of the problems facing private sector pension schemes.
	I intend to concentrate on the public sector pension issue, partly because otherwise we would be rather anticipating what we think the Turner report is going to say. I do not believe that it will be a central issue of that report, but I do believe that it is something we must face up to now. I should declare my interest as a pension fund manager for almost 30 years, and a member of my own small self-administered pension scheme, which is rather like a SIPP; that is, a private pensions pot.
	With A-day for pension simplification looming next April, when I shall be 59 and thus almost of public sector pension age, I will probably decide to start drawing my own pension. How much will I need? I thought that I had better take a look and get a few quotes for what I can do with my pension pot. What about starting with the equivalent of an MP's maximum pension under the current House of Commons scheme? There an MP would retire now on £39,400 a year after 26 years and eight months' service, with an index-linked spouse's benefit at five-eighths of the MP's pension and unlimited indexation of pensions in payment. How much of my pension pot would I need to buy that pension from, say, the Prudential? I would need the sum of £1.2 million.
	What about a Permanent Secretary with, say, 38 years in the Civil Service and retiring today at 60 on an index-linked pension of £62,000 a year? The man from the Pru would charge £1.9 million for that one, or £3.8 million for a pension of £125,000 a year at the top end of the Permanent Secretary's range. Doctors in London—though not just in London because my wife is a doctor, although part time—quite normally now earn £100,000 a year. At the end of a normal working life, the pension value would be around £1.5 million on those prices. I did not even dare to get a quote for a judge's pension because I know how sensitive our friends in that area are about their contractual rights. However, I am delighted that the Government at last seem to appreciate the absurdity of introducing a Bill to exempt only judges from a new tax on pension rights which is to apply to everyone else in the United Kingdom.
	I give these examples not because I begrudge our dedicated public servants a decent pension—accrued pension rights must be respected and changes must have long lead times, but something like a 20-year lead time would be reasonable, not the 40 years the Government have now conceded—but because we must face up to the widening chasm between our two nations of pension provision. It is unfair and it will make it much harder for people to move between the public and private sectors over their careers. Not only will that be a loss to them, but a loss to the economy as a whole.
	There is a growing sense of injustice as the unfunded liabilities of public sector schemes grow and people in the private sector anticipate both worsening pension provision for themselves and higher taxes. Almost all of the public sector, whether in funded or unfunded schemes, enjoys what nowadays can only be described as gold standard pension provision—defined benefit schemes with no limitation of guaranteed price indexation of pensions in payment to 2.5 per cent a year, which the Government introduced in the Pensions Act for private sector schemes; no need to pay possibly crippling insurance premiums to the pension protection fund, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, pointed out; and an open-ended guarantee of public sector pensions from taxpayers and council tax payers.
	The noble Lord, Lord Turner, whom I warmly welcome to the House—I remember him as a very bright young man on the Economic Affairs Committee of the SDP many years ago—referred to the memorable statistic that the public sector employs 18 per cent of the country's workforce with 30 per cent of the pension rights. On the present rates of closure of good quality DB schemes in the private sector, only the directors' schemes—and here I agree very much with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser—of some FTSE 100 companies and the main schemes of a few very big oil companies and banks will offer pensions remotely in the same league as the public sector in five years' time.
	There might have been a case for these levels of public sector benefits when comparable benefits were common and when public sector employees earned less than those in the private sector—but now that is just not so. National Statistics last week published the results of the 2005 annual survey of hours and earnings. Median full-time weekly earnings in the public sector were £475 a week in April this year, up by 4.1 per cent from a year ago. Median full-time private sector earnings were £413 a week, up only 2.8 per cent over the year. The public-private sector pay gap had widened to £62 a week from £53 a week last year.

Lord Lea of Crondall: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Is he not aware that the average income of a FTSE 250 chief executive is now £1 million plus? Is he suggesting that is not different from the public sector?

Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay: Not at all, my Lords. With great respect to the noble Lord, I do not think he has been listening to the point I have made. I believe that pension benefits and pay at the top of the private sector are unfair, as I said when I referred to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. But I am now talking about the total figures as a whole, and one has to accept that many millions of people in the private sector have no pension provision at all, or very poor pension provision, which is a separate point.
	If we calculate the full cost of public sector provision properly, we could also give public sector servants genuine freedom of choice over their own pension provision. If we saw what the costs really were and the Government and employers had to pay a fair share of them, I believe that many employees in the public sector—I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall—particularly among the low paid, of whom, I accept, there are many, would prefer to have more pay and a less expensive pension option.
	New entrants to the public sector could be offered three main options in a constructive and reforming way ahead. First, they could keep the current gold standard provision, the true cost of which is probably something like 30 per cent of salary, spread between employee and employer.
	The second option could be a new kind of silver standard DB pension scheme, similar to some of the remaining good-quality schemes. It would involve limited indexation and some sharing of risk and the cost would probably be about 20 per cent. Thirdly, there could be a bronze standard DC scheme, much more like stakeholder schemes in the private sector, where the total cost would be about 10 per cent. Those would be the choices.
	With any of those schemes, the pension age would need to rise gradually to make them affordable. But we cannot expect millions of people to work until the age of 67 for their basic state pension if public sector workers continue to retire at 60 until half way through the century. That is just not fair.
	Finally, I believe that the lead for public sector pension reform must come from the top. Members of another place may not welcome this advice from a Member of your Lordships' House, but I believe that both public and private sector employees will give a very rude answer if members of the most generous pension scheme in Britain in the House of Commons tell them that they have to pay more towards their pension and work longer to get it, if that is what they hear from Members of Parliament. The way to show Britain that we are serious about solving this crisis is for Parliament to put its own pensions house in order.

Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lord Fowler on achieving this debate against some opposition, muted though it was.
	The House was no doubt surprised to find the subject of pensions on the Order Paper just days before we are promised the second report of the Pensions Commission. Whether this Motion appearing on the Order Paper caused the leaks that we have seen in today's Financial Times is a moot point. Nevertheless, as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, said, it is as a background for that report that this debate is being held. The noble Lord laid into the previous Conservative government, but I remind him that this Government have now had eight years to act. However many recriminations we have heard—I shall make a few—we should remember that we are where we are now, as the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, has just said. Thus, I was pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, majored on that. Earlier in the debate there was a reference to beds of nails, and I observe that not one or two but four fakirs are speaking in this debate.
	As many speakers have said, the Government are in a mess on the pensions issue. The result of the debate on the Terrorism Bill in another place last week has been widely remarked upon in the newspapers. But I regard the subject of the health and wealth of the nation's retired people to be even more important, and I am glad to know that, since I took this job, hardly a day has gone by without the thorny question of pensions being covered in one newspaper or another—not that any of them have any ideas as to what to do about the problem. However, they all accept that in 1997 the Government inherited the best pension position of any country in Europe.
	Today, eight years later, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, pointed out, we are in the position so ably described by your Lordships today. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, that a consensus is required. But, as I shall say later, it takes two to tango. However, it is not true to say that the Government have done nothing. Last year's Pensions Act set up the insurance scheme for occupational pension schemes, known as the PPF. There are inevitable problems with the annual premium levels that such schemes should pay, and my noble friend Lord Hodgson spoke vehemently about the unfairness that is currently proposed. That said, I am sure that they will be sorted out in time.
	In addition, during the passage of the Pensions Bill, the Government were forced by a threatened Back-Bench rebellion to set up a fund to give a small pension to retirees who had lost all their pension entitlement because their firms and final salary schemes had gone bust. Considering what they have missed out on, that is far from generous. Both these schemes help a little but do nothing for the myriad of people who have only their state pension, with or without pension credit, to rely on in their old age, which is lasting longer and longer. More curious in the Act was the provision of a lump sum option for members of the workforce who choose to carry on working beyond their retirement age and do not draw the state pension. That, of course, is an alternative to the enhanced weekly amount that the Conservative government brought in for such people.
	I railed against that commutation at the time on the basis that pensions are a means of saving for retirement and are not intended to build up a "pot" which can be spent on anything—a holiday or paying for a new kitchen or whatever.
	The only thing that can be said for that part of the Act is that it might—just might—act as an incentive for people to extend their working lives. We are now told that people must extend their working lives. When she was Prime Minister, my noble friend Lady Thatcher coined the phrase, "There is no alternative"; indeed, on this issue, there is not.
	That brings me to joined-up government, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Fowler. It was around the time that the Bill was enacted that we had the Budget which, among myriad other matters, capped personal pension funds at £1.5 million. Any amount over that figure was taxed at 55 per cent. Of course, that affects only a small number of people. Shortly afterwards came the election and the gracious Speech, which proposed a Bill to take judges' pensions out of this regime. Last week, it was quietly dropped, infuriating the judges, who suffer a serious pay cut when they are appointed but can afford, during their time at the Bar, to build up a large pension pot. It was a proposal to divide the rich, and I am not surprised that we are where we are. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has stamped heavily on the toes of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor and those with large pension pots.
	Another effect of the election was for the Prime Minister to move the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to the DTI, but asking him to retain control of public sector pensions. A few months later, he had several meetings with representatives of the teaching profession, the Civil Service and the NHS, and committed the Government to allowing those members already in work to continue to their current retirement age—usually, but not universally, 60—while insisting that new employees work until they are 65.
	Can the Minister explain how overall public sector reform is intended to be implemented when the Deputy Prime Minister insists that his department is considered separately from the ongoing negotiations? How are reforms ever to be carried out if every time a strike is threatened, the Government return to square one? This does not appear to me to be joined-up government. And if the Government cannot persuade the public sector unions' members of the need to work until they are 65, how on earth are they to convince them to work until they are 67?
	The noble Baroness, Lady Turner, whose expertise on pensions I recognise and welcome, does not seem to realise that the contract is not really being torn up. The existing public service employees have made their contributions on the basis on which they joined first their work and then their scheme. If they worked longer, it goes without saying that they will receive more in retirement.
	Two other points arise. Why are the Government treating the public sector employees differently from private sector employees currently in work? They are encouraging private sector workers to work more and retire later to prepare for their retirement. However, they do not dare to say the same to public sector workers. Of course, certain jobs, such as those in fire fighting or the Armed Forces, must be taken into special consideration, but that need not stop pension policy being pursued equitably across all sectors.
	What does such a policy do for recruitment in the public sector? I shall not go into detail, but the Government are not even applying the same standards of transparency to themselves as they apply to private firms. The Institute of Economic Affairs estimation of the Government's public sector pension liability is nearly twice as high as the Treasury's.
	The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry has acknowledged that it is unfair for public sector workers to enjoy greater benefits than the private sector workers who fund them. Nevertheless, he has failed to follow through any reforms that will reduce the problem and is now proposing public sector reforms that will not be completed until after 2044. Why is he not following the well trodden and acceptable path that the previous Conservative government introduced for extending women's working life, another thing we are led to believe the Turner report will say?
	When I left school, I could realistically expect to live until I was 77. Today, I can reasonably expect to remain alive until I am 81. In other words, for every 10 years that pass, I can foresee living for one extra year. The need for people to save and the Exchequer to have an achievable commitment to state pensions is therefore clear. The noble Lord, Lord Freeman, and my noble friend Lord Trenchard raised that matter, but that is not the only problem that the Government have visited upon us.
	The Prime Minister stated in February that he did not want the majority of people to be on means-tested pensions, but his policies have been predicted to achieve exactly that. Some 46 per cent of pensioners are subject to means testing now and that will rise to 64 per cent by 2025. When £1 of income from a private pension can lead to a 40p drop in one's state pension, is it any wonder that many people do not consider private pensions worth their while to save for?
	Alas, time does not allow me to give my views on personal and occupational pensions mentioned by so many of your Lordships today. However, I point out to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, that pension schemes had no option but to take pension holidays—the Inland Revenue demanded it at the time.
	I hope that the forthcoming report of the Pensions Commission will be fully and completely costed, because from the leaks that we have heard and seen, their recommendations are potentially unaffordable. The important thing is that the report should spur the Government on to the necessary action and soon—not, as the Prime Minister has suggested, in the next Parliament.

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath: My Lords, I try not to.
	The Pensions Commission's first report made clear that the implications for pensioner income will be more serious in 20 to 25 years' time than in the next 10, although I fully accept the warning that my noble friend made about the position of many women. As my noble friend Lord Lea suggested, we face demographic change, but so does every developed country and the scale of change that we face is less than in most countries in Europe. I am not complacent; but there are some strengths to our current system that we must build upon rather than build the problem up into a crisis. Meeting older people, as I have done, in a number of sessions to talk about pensions, actually makes them feel that they are a problem. That is wrong. We must look at older people as being an asset to society. In all that we do in relation to pensions or encouraging people to work longer, we need to recognise the strength and contribution that older people can make in our society.
	If I could summarise the comments made on the Benches opposite about the Government's record, I would have to say that they were not entirely complimentary. But I want to put that into context; surely, the root of our private pensions' challenge lies back in the early 1990s. We all remember the mis-selling scandals, which started to create an air of mistrust in pensions—and I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, was rather quiet on that subject. There are a number of reasons for the recent problems besetting defined benefit pension schemes, but we cannot ignore the stock market fall, which is worldwide rather than just a British phenomenon.
	I realise that a number of noble Lords here have taken part in pensions debates over a number of years, and clearly the withdrawal of payable tax credits is something that noble Lords have debated on a number of occasions. The Pensions Policy Institute, which we all respect, has estimated that the impact is significantly less than £5 billion a year. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Young said, whatever the short-term effect of the measures on pension schemes might have been, it was small compared to the other factors that I have already mentioned, such as stock market trends. Surely, we cannot ignore the wider package of corporation tax reforms that took place at the same time.
	We should not underestimate, either, what the Government have achieved for pensioners today. Again, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Hollis. The fact is that, over the past eight years, pensioners' incomes have grown, not only in real terms but faster than earnings. Since 1996, pensioners' incomes have risen by 21 per cent, compared to 13 per cent for earnings, adjusted for price growth. I do not want to be complacent, but surely noble Lords must acknowledge the progress that has been made.
	Noble Lords have mentioned pension credit, which has made a huge difference to many pensioners. We now pay pension credit to 3.3 million pensioners in 2.7 million households, with an average award of £40 a week. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and assure her that we are working as hard as we can to increase uptake; but we should not ignore the huge beneficial impact that it has had on many older people.
	The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in his constructive speech, said that basic state pension is the core of all pension policy, and there is much in that. My noble friend Lady Turner unsurprisingly made a plea for more generous basic state pensions; anyone who heard the riveting debates that she took part in with the late Baroness Castle will know of her strong passion in this area.
	The emphasis that the Government have given since we came to power has been to tackle pensioner poverty. The approach taken was to address and target resources at those who most needed them; simply increasing basic state pension would not have helped those without full records—a point that my noble friend Lady Hollis so persuasively made—and only 30 per cent of women reaching state pension age have a full contribution record. So increasing the basic state pension to the guaranteed credit level, for which a number of noble Lords have argued and for which a number of organisations have argued outside this House, if earnings were uprated in future, would cost £8 billion immediately and an additional £82 billion—2.6 per cent of GDP—by 2050, which is a very large sum of money. Clearly the Government's approach up to now has been to say that we should use the pension credit to ensure that the poorest pensioners share in the growing wealth of the nation while keeping spending on pensioners as a percentage of GDP broadly the same in future as it is today. Of course, we shall have to see what transpires from the Pensions Commission, but that is the Government's current view.
	A number of noble Lords referred to the demographic changes that have taken place. It is true that whenever forecasts by government and the actuary are made, in practice they turn out to be under-optimistic. No doubt we should rejoice at that, as the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, suggested. For instance, in 1980 decisions about public pension policy were being made on the basis of estimates that male life expectancy from age 65 in the year 2000 would be about 14 years. Now we have reached 2005, the estimate is 19 years. Looking forward, the current official base case forecast is 24 years of life expectancy for a man reaching 65 in 2050. However, many experts believe this will be revised upwards significantly as new information becomes available; indeed, figures in the high twenties are quite possible, and I agree with the comments made by a number of noble Lords about the need for this to be kept under active and regular review.
	A number of points were made about the importance of savings with which I very much agree. I was interested in the pension health check mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman. As a young person, I would have welcomed that. The Government recognise that part of encouraging people to save and go into pensions when they have the ability to do so is to improve financial literacy. That involves schools, and I know that they are doing what they can to increase financial literacy. Alongside that, we also have a programme that provides both state and private sector pension forecasts. More than 6 million people, including me, have received such a forecast. I think it was helpful, and I know that many people who received it found it so. We are also working to develop an online pension planner that will provide the sort of information that the noble Lord is seeking. Individual pension schemes could also do much more in that regard.
	The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made a point about annuities. We will consider issues like that in the light of what the Pensions Commission has to say.
	I move to a somewhat contentious matter: the subject of public pensions. Noble Lords opposite were critical of what the Government have achieved, but they understated the fact that the unions have agreed that, for new entrants in the public sector schemes for the Civil Service, the NHS and teachers, the retirement age will be increased to 65. That is a useful achievement. We always made clear that public sector pensions would be reformed, and that we needed to do that on the basis of affordability as well as what is needed to recruit and retain.
	We had always intended to provide existing staff with plenty of notice of the pension age change in order to allow them to adjust their retirement plans accordingly. Indeed, the agreement that has now been reached will be helpful to the condition and climate for pension change in the future. It has been agreed with the unions that the full savings we originally planned from reform will still be met. The question of how those savings are to be arrived at will be considered by the schemes when drawing up their further proposals on scheme design. This is a matter that has been discounted by many commentators because scheme-by-scheme negotiations will also consider whether schemes will move to a career-average basis, and all other aspects of reform other than the pension age question.
	The agreement will result in substantial savings—an estimated £13 billion to the taxpayer in net present-value terms. It is a sustainable solution for the long term, and noble Lords opposite have underestimated the achievement of the Government in reaching that agreement.

Lord Warner: rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 3 November be approved. [8th Report from the Joint Committee and 14th Report from the Merits Committee]

Lord Warner: My Lords, the Welfare Food Scheme has played a vital role in providing a valuable safety net for pregnant women and families since it was introduced back in 1940. It is currently serving about 560,000 low income and disadvantaged households. But it now needs updating better to meet the nutritional requirements of present day families.
	In discussions on the enabling powers contained in the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Act 2003, several concerns were raised about the changes proposed to the Welfare Food Scheme. We have tried to take on board the comments made at that time and have reflected them in the proposals we are now making. For example, we are proposing to introduce the reforms in two stages to test the scheme prior to full implementation across Great Britain.
	That is taking up very much the points made during the debate on the 2003 Act by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barker.
	We propose to implement Healthy Start in Devon and Cornwall in the first instance. During that first phase, beneficiaries in Devon and Cornwall will receive Healthy Start vouchers, while beneficiaries in the rest of Great Britain will continue to receive Welfare Food Scheme milk tokens. Existing beneficiaries in Devon and Cornwall will be automatically transferred onto the new scheme to ensure seamless provision. Beneficiaries in phase 1 will receive with their vouchers Healthy Start communications providing information about the scheme and useful hints and tips on eating a balanced, healthy diet. Those materials will be part of a larger communications strategy developed to support the introduction of the new scheme. As part of phase 1, we propose to remove provision of low-cost infant formula via the NHS across the whole of Great Britain to families with children under the age of one who receive specified tax credits and have a family income under a certain threshold. NHS clinics in Devon and Cornwall will also cease the provision of all infant formula from the start of phase 1, which will support the department's commitment to increasing the number of mothers who initiate breastfeeding. It is also our intention to remove the exchange of infant formula, as part of the scheme, from all NHS clinics from the start of phase 2. We expect phase 2 of Healthy Start to be rolled out across the rest of Great Britain later in 2006, taking into account the feedback from the evaluation of phase 1.
	In the main, beneficiaries currently receiving Welfare Food Scheme milk tokens will also be entitled to Healthy Start vouchers. The scheme will continue to provide, in phase 1, vouchers to all pregnant women and children under five in low-income families on certain benefits—income support, income-based jobseeker's allowance and child tax credit. But we intend to remove entitlement for those pregnant beneficiaries currently receiving tokens because they are in a family receiving pension credit (guarantee credit)—that applies to fewer than 200 women—from phase 1 because of the greater value of this benefit. We also intend to remove entitlement for the small number of disabled children aged five to 16 years not in relevant education as a result of their disability, but we have made a commitment to provide a one-off goodwill payment to those disabled children. The Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy concluded that there was no nutritional justification for continuing that element of the scheme.
	In contrast, we will provide Healthy Start vouchers to all pregnant under 18 year-olds regardless of their income, because we know that teenagers' diets are often nutritionally poor. Supporting young pregnant women during such an important time can only improve the health outcomes for both mother and baby. From phase 2, we intend to reduce the age limit for the scheme from age five to age four. We have not reduced the age range during phase 1 as that would create inconsistencies and inequalities between those receiving Healthy Start vouchers in Devon and Cornwall and those receiving milk tokens throughout the rest of Great Britain. As a result, we can increase the support that we give to families with the youngest and most vulnerable children by providing double vouchers to most families with children under the age of one.
	The new scheme also recognises that premature babies may need extra nutritional support, and so double vouchers will be paid. We propose that the value of each voucher should be £2.80 per week, but regularly reviewed, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in the passage of the 2003 Act. Beneficiaries will receive vouchers in advance in four-weekly cycles, and the vouchers will normally have a four-week expiry date. In circumstances where a backdated payment is made, vouchers may be issued with a longer expiry date. Regulation 8(2) allows for an expiry date of up to six months.
	During previous debates on the changes, concerns were expressed, by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Chan, about the introduction of an application process. Those concerns have been considered but we still regard the application process as an important aspect of the scheme, as it forges closer links with the NHS and the very people who are likely to need the most support. The contact will be between beneficiaries and health professionals, which I think was also supported by a number of speakers in debate on the 2003 Act.
	The application process will create opportunities for health professionals to provide information and advice about healthy eating as an integral part of the scheme. Only new beneficiaries will need to complete an application form, to be signed by a health professional, as existing beneficiaries will be automatically transferred to the new scheme. Under the current scheme, pregnant women already complete an application form, so this is an extension of that existing process. We would expect the application form to be signed by either a midwife or a health visitor, as they are most likely to be in regular contact with the beneficiary. That process very much fits in with the current role of midwives and health visitors, as they currently sign applications for the Sure Start maternity grant. We have consulted the Royal College of Midwives and the Community Practitioners' and Health Visitors' Association in establishing the requirements.
	We intend to develop and deliver a package of health professional training sessions, as well as other supporting materials, to set Healthy Start in the context of wider health advice and guidance. But I should make it clear that we certainly do not expect health professionals to establish whether a potential beneficiary is entitled to vouchers in any way.
	To help and support beneficiaries in making the right dietary choices, we want to make the scheme more flexible by increasing the range of foods under the scheme and providing a fixed-value voucher. Although we intend to expand the range of foods under the scheme, we have kept it relatively simple at this stage, including fresh fruit and fresh vegetables as well as liquid cows' milk and infant formula. That is to avoid confusion at the point of sale—particularly, for example, with frozen vegetables, which could include items such as frozen chips that for obvious reasons we would not want to promote through the scheme. We will consider the range of foods and the "5 a day" initiative as part of the evaluation of phase 1.
	We will actively target retailers currently registered with the Welfare Food Scheme, and will seek to recruit further retailers to participate in Healthy Start to ensure that beneficiaries have the widest access possible to a variety of local retailers, including initiatives such as box schemes and farmers' markets. To participate in the scheme, retailers need to supply only at least one of the food types under the scheme—for example, milkmen who stock only milk for their rounds. Retailers will be required to complete and sign a simple application form, which includes a declaration as an anti-fraud measure highlighting to retailers their responsibilities under the scheme. Once registered, retailers will receive a registration pack containing a handy window sticker and a retailer quick reference guide, as well as their first claim form.
	The process for reimbursing retailers is designed to be straightforward to ensure unnecessary burdens are not imposed, particularly on smaller businesses. Vouchers will be reimbursed at full face value, so the current and unpopular retailer deduction will cease. That means that, for every £2.80 voucher exchanged by a retailer, £2.80 is received back.
	Every scheme is vulnerable to fraud but we have considered carefully the concerns expressed previously by, in particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, about the potential for abuse of the scheme. We are working with NHS counter-fraud specialists to minimise fraudulent activity, including the establishment of a common Healthy Start contractor database.
	Concerns have been previously raised by the dairy industry about expanding the range of foods. We have met several key stakeholders to discuss the changes we are proposing and have agreed to review the scheme and its processes as part of the phase 1 evaluation. But we must reform the scheme if we are more fully to meet the nutritional requirements of those pregnant women and young children who most need it. Beneficiaries may prefer to continue getting just milk with the new vouchers, rather than using the vouchers for fruit and vegetables—that is their choice.
	We will undertake a rapid evaluation of the impact and processes for phase 1 before the scheme is rolled out nationwide. I think that that was recommended by the noble Baronesses, Lady Barker and Lady Howarth of Breckland, in debates in 2003. I commend the regulations to the House, and beg to move.
	Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 3 November be approved [8th Report from the Joint Committee and 14th Report from the Merits Committee].—(Lord Warner.)

Baroness Morris of Bolton: My Lords, I thank the Minister for explaining the regulations, which establish phase 1 of the new Healthy Start scheme in Devon and Cornwall and amend previous regulations. The Welfare Food Scheme has been in place since the beginning of the Second World War and, however useful its purpose, it is right that it should be reviewed in the light of the vast knowledge and experience that we now have on nutrition and vitamins.
	The Government have chosen Devon and Cornwall for this six- to eight-month trial because of their geographical isolation and demographics in terms of urban centres, medium to small towns and rural villages, and it is understandable why these factors make it a sensible place for the trial. But by their own admission in the Explanatory Notes the Government recognise that there are only small pockets of deprivation in that area. Why did the Government not consider a metropolitan area to be more suitable, or why not trial the scheme in both a rural and a metropolitan area so that the findings could be compared and contrasted?
	The current Welfare Food scheme is limited to milk and infant formula. While the scheme's aims of broadening the foodstuffs available and providing greater access to those foods through a fixed-value voucher are worthy, we have concerns. Under the new proposals, all the value of the voucher could be spent on fruit and vegetables. We argued during the passage of the Bill that a portion of the voucher should be ring-fenced for milk. There are many worries that children will lose out on the nutritional value of milk. Will the Minister comment on that and on the strong concerns expressed by dairymen about the knock-on effect on their deliveries? Will he explain how the vouchers will account for the considerable variation in the price of fruit and vegetables around the country, the seasonality of prices and the impact of inflationary rises and falls?
	As part of the scheme and in line with the Government's drive to encourage breastfeeding, provision of infant formula will be withdrawn. I am a strong advocate of breastfeeding, the benefits of which are many and well-chronicled. It is particularly important if there is a history of allergies in the family. Breastfed babies receive protection from infections and illness, and there is the added benefit that mothers who breastfeed are less at risk from a number of conditions.
	However, not all women can breastfeed. It can be horribly painful and some babies just do not thrive. There was an article in the Sunday Times this weekend by Sarah Smith, who was so embarrassed that she was bottle-feeding her baby, due to her daughter being a lazy sucker, that she pretended to breastfeed. The last thing we should do is somehow to demonise mothers who, for whatever reason, cannot breastfeed. Nor must we make them feel that in any way they are inferior mothers or that they are letting their children down. Surely, the best way to encourage breastfeeding is through education. Is it sensible to withdraw infant formula? Could that not leave some babies undernourished?
	The scheme requires a healthcare professional to sign the application form, with the aim of forging closer links with the NHS, so families have access to advice on diet, nutrition and other health issues. Yet during the consultation, as the Minister mentioned, many NHS practitioners felt that mandatory contact would stigmatise the NHS. I am still not sure why the Government decided to go along that route. Will it not add considerably to an already overburdened NHS?
	I do not ask such questions to be difficult or to oppose the regulations, with which we are in broad agreement, but to raise genuine areas of concern and to probe the intentions behind government's thinking.

Baroness Barker: My Lords, there were happy occasions during the passage of the primary legislation when we debated this subject at length with the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who gave her customary full and detailed replies. I am delighted to see these regulations before us.
	However, it is fair to ask one or two questions about the operation of the scheme. Referring to those debates, the Minister will know that we were concerned that a scheme for so long successful in its universal coverage of children and mothers was about to be disrupted. Therefore, it is beholden on us to test some of the assumptions behind it.
	The first point is the value of the voucher, at £2.80. I shall assume that that is based on the price of milk at the moment. Given that fruit and vegetables are now included and, as the noble Baroness said, there are variations by region and by price, will that be monitored? In his introduction, the Minister said that the Government were committed to ensuring that the scheme will be updated. How and when will that uprating happen? Will there be an annual uprating, and will it be in line with inflation?
	The scheme as the Minister outlined it will apply to children up to the age of four, not five as with the current milk scheme. Is that because there is an assumption that children will go to school and that their nutritional needs will be met in school at the age of five? Perhaps the noble Lord can confirm whether that is right.
	It seems strange to have chosen to pilot the scheme in Devon and Cornwall, as the noble Baroness said. I am sure that there are good reasons for doing so, but to pilot a scheme like this in an area where there are so few members of black and minority ethnic communities is strange. In the roll-out of the scheme—in future it will be rolled-out to other areas—will its effect on minority communities be closely monitored?
	What will the Government do to ensure that there are enough registered food outlets available within an area, particularly in rural areas, to ensure the scheme is workable in the way that he envisages? If there are not enough outlets, what other proposals will be put in place? The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned that the scheme is confined solely to cows' milk. Some children are allergic to cows' milk and, therefore, depend on goats' milk or soya milk. There is a perfectly good nutritional reason for those alternatives to be considered, so perhaps the noble Lord would say why not.
	Regulation 13(2) states that there will be no refunds when someone presents at a food outlet but does not obtain food to the full value of the voucher. Why is that so? Regulation 13(3) says that if retailers do not have goods available, they will be able to write a note. Does that mean that the system will work like medical prescriptions, when if a pharmacist cannot supply a prescription in full, he writes a note for the person to present on a subsequent occasion.
	Perhaps the Minister can explain why children of asylum seekers are not to be included in this scheme. I suspect that he will say that children of asylum seekers and pregnant asylum-seeking women will be dealt with by other authorities. If professionals with knowledge of and concerned about children's welfare and health are concentrated in this scheme, why should asylum seekers not be in touch with those people?
	Will the Government keep under review the diversity of the retailers that participate in the scheme? When we discussed this matter under the primary legislation, there was a fear that the scheme may become a means whereby retailers get themselves into a monopoly position with the NHS and have undue influence over the provision of essential food to children. I would be grateful if the noble Lord would answer those questions.

Lord Warner: My Lords, I shall respond briefly to the points raised in this debate on these important regulations. On the alleged new burdens on midwives and health visitors, they, after all, already see pregnant women now and are best placed to give advice about a healthy diet, which is the purpose of this scheme. We have discussed these issues with their professional bodies. It is worth bearing in mind that, if I may gently say to the noble Lord, Lord Chan, that the number of midwives is increasing, a time when the birth rate has been falling. So these issues have been actively considered.
	Why Devon and Cornwall? I shall not reply "Why not?" The selection of Devon and Cornwall for phase 1 was based on three main criteria. First, it is geographically self-contained, with borders that do not cut across large urban communities; secondly, it includes a mixture of current approaches to the supply of infant formula through the Welfare Food Scheme; and, thirdly, it includes both urban and rural areas and pockets of deprivation as well as larger identifiable disadvantaged populations. There will be some degree of involvement in the scheme by people from black and minority ethnic groups. We will of course closely monitor that after wider roll-out of the scheme.
	On the issue of the value of the voucher—why £2.80?—the amount equates to the average cost of seven pints of liquid milk provided through the existing Welfare Food Scheme. It was decided not to vary this value from the average cost of seven pints of milk to ensure equity with people on the Welfare Food Scheme outside Devon and Cornwall. But, as part of the evaluation of phase 1, the voucher value and the quantity of Healthy Start foods purchased with it are intended to be examined.
	Will the voucher amount be increased at the rate of inflation? We intend to regularly review the value of vouchers and we will increase it in line with the increase in the retail prices of foods available through the Healthy Start scheme. Picking up on a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Chan, we will of course look at the types of food that are appropriate.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, raised the issue of babies who do not feed well or who may not be able to tolerate cows' milk. Healthy Start, like the Welfare Food Scheme, is designed to meet the nutritional needs of healthy pregnant women, babies and children. If a baby has a specific health problem with the mother, a health professional should be consulted, and specialist infant formulas can be prescribed through the NHS if there is a clear medical need for them. NHS prescriptions are, of course, free for all children.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, asked why asylum seekers were not included under the Healthy Start scheme. They are not included because their needs are currently met by the National Asylum Support Service—and this principle has been reinforced by the High Court. We are keeping NASS informed of our plans for implementation of the Healthy Start scheme, so that it can review the support it gives to asylum seekers who are pregnant or have young children, and modify it as appropriate.
	Soya-based products are excluded from the scheme on the basis of expert medical advice that they are not as nutritionally adequate as cows' milk. Soya drinks are low in energy, compared with cows' milk, and lack several vitamins and minerals. Never let it be said that I do not bring education to this House.
	The issue of retailer monopoly was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker. Registration is open to any retailer selling one or more relevant products, and we will encourage the widest range of retailers to take part, to provide choice and greater accessibility.
	Vouchers, in most instances, must be exchanged for goods to their full value in order to ensure that the voucher is exchanged for only Healthy Start foods. Regulation 13 applies especially to milkmen, who may take the voucher and provide milk throughout the week. We understand the concerns of the dairy industry. There is already a decline in the number of milk-round men in general outside the changes proposed by the Welfare Food Scheme, but we will keep things under control.
	I believe that the changes set out in these regulations will help us better to support the nutritional needs of low-income families. On those points I have not been able to respond to I will write to noble Lords. In the mean time, I commend the regulations to the House, and I hope that we can approve them.

Lord Stratford: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for facilitating this debate. I cannot underline and emphasise enough the importance of the point she made at the beginning of her remarks; that is, the need to do something about the exaggeration and the hysteria that surrounds the current outbreak of avian flu. Much of the blame lies with the absurd stories we have been regaled with in the media, particularly in the tabloid press. One headline stated: "750,000 People in the United Kingdom Likely to Die". I think that was in the Daily Express. In "my soaraway Sun" there was a picture of a flock of geese with the caption, "Ducks of Death". That sort of reporting is irresponsible—it is absurd—and needs to be addressed.
	Of course one has to be aware of the potential dangers, but it is essential to keep the whole thing in proportion. I understand that there are at least 144 strains of avian influenza, and most of the viruses in the wild bird population are benign. Here we are talking about the highly pathogenic flu virus H5N1 which can cause high mortality in domestic poultry flocks, but it is rare in wild birds. Indeed, it appears that H5N1 had never previously been recorded in wild birds before the recent outbreaks in south-east Asia, Russia and the countries bordering the Black Sea. The chances are that the infection originated in domestic poultry and was then transmitted to wild birds.
	What upsets me most about this—I have to try to control myself when I get involved in debates of this sort—is that, along with most ecological disasters, the blame lies essentially with the practices of human beings. We ought to have learnt the lessons by now. If we play dice with nature, there will be a price to pay, and the price is likely to be high. In the case of avian flu the cause has been clearly attributed to the methods of husbandry practised in south-east Asia where dense populations of domestic flocks are allowed to intermix with wild birds, especially water birds.
	The noble Baroness referred to yet another reported death, but to put the danger to human beings in context we have to remember that since 2003 only 60 deaths worldwide have been caused by avian flu. It is pretty tough if you were one of the people who happened to die as a result of avian flu, but when more than 60 people a week are killed in road accidents in this country, we must realise that the whole thing is getting out of proportion. To go from 60 deaths around the world since 2003 to 750,000 deaths in one country, as suggested in the Daily Express, is a statistical leap of quantum proportions. It really is about time that the headline writers on our newspapers behaved more responsibly.
	A further point of concern is the talk of carrying out culls of wild birds. Not only would that be unacceptable and incredibly difficult to implement, but it would also be unlikely to stop the potential spread of the disease. I believe that the danger to human beings is being exaggerated, but the threat to wild birds is real and genuine. It is estimated that between 5 and 10 per cent of the world population of wild bar-headed geese died in the recent outbreak in China. The real sufferers in the current avian flu scare, notwithstanding the people who regrettably and tragically have died, are domestic poultry. The last outbreak of avian flu in Belgium in 2003 resulted in the destruction of 30 million poultry, while there was one human fatality. In the current outbreak many millions of healthy domestic animals are being slaughtered, often in the most appalling circumstances. We have seen pictures of birds being burnt while they are clearly still alive. That is obscene and unacceptable.
	I do not understand what it is about human beings that we are so destructive of animal life. When wild animals affect domestic animals it is, "Let's kill the wild animals". When domestic animals affect human beings then it is, "Let's kill the domestic animals". We never seem ready to blame ourselves for the kinds of scenarios that we can see unfolding in front of us. The carnage is our responsibility and the cause of the problem lies essentially with us. I keep thinking about the BSE crisis, which was entirely man made. If you are going to feed herbivores reprocessed animal protein, how on earth can anyone expect that there will not be a price to pay at some later stage? There was, and millions of healthy animals were destroyed. I said at the time—I have said this in the other place on many occasions—that the programme of destruction owed more to voodoo than it did to science.
	My noble friend the Minister was a little put out by a point I made in a Question recently when I referred to the Daleks in his department. It was certainly true of the old MAFF. "Exterminate them" seems to be their answer to almost everything, whether it is bovine TB, BSE or, potentially now, avian flu. All I can say is, "Thank God his officials do not run the National Health Service". Clearly the answer to the current outbreak lies in improved bio security, primarily in the poultry industry.
	The noble Baroness also referred to the import of wild birds. I believe that the current temporary ban on the import of wild birds should be made permanent. I do not see any reason why we should allow this trade to go on. It is unnecessary, abhorrent and entirely destructive. When you look at the statistics you realise how appalling they are. The European Union is the largest importer of wild caught birds in the world, responsible for 93 per cent of imports of threatened and endangered species. This equates to more than 2.5 million birds imported into the EU between 2000 and 2003. When one adds all the illegal birds—which come in, I might add, under the cover of the legal trade—one realises how venal and destructive of wildlife this trade is.
	It will not come as any great surprise to my friends in the other place, and perhaps to my friends here, that I care more for animals than I do for people. I make that confession mainly because I have found in my experience that people as a species are fairly disgusting. That is something that I will have to live. No doubt Members will get used to it in the years to come.
	I am willing to bet my pension—which, in view of the previous debate, is probably a good bet to place—that there will not be a human pandemic arising from the current outbreak of avian flu. That is my prediction and that is the bet that I am prepared to make. But, of course, I have the comfort that, were I to be wrong on this occasion, I will not be around to surrender my pension.

Baroness Masham of Ilton: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for asking whether we are prepared for an outbreak of avian flu. The World Health Organisation has stated that the avian flu virus H5N1,
	"poses a continuing and potentially pandemic threat".
	Our Chief Medical Officer has stated,
	"most experts believe that it is not a question of whether there will be another severe influenza pandemic, but when".
	Everyone must hope that this will not happen, but we must not become complacent. We should all be on the alert.
	I must declare an interest. I have chickens, peacocks and doves at our house. On the estate there are masses of pheasants, grouse, ducks, geese and wild birds of all descriptions—except sparrows, which have disappeared. I have a pony stud and a small riding centre.
	The symptoms of avian influenza include fever, sore throat and cough. The severe cases progress to pneumonia, which is fatal in some individuals. The symptoms are similar to other viral infections and the diagnosis can be confirmed only by laboratory identification of the virus. The avian virus is highly contagious and spreads rapidly among poultry flocks. When we had such a devastating time with foot and mouth disease and we now have a threat of avian flu, why have the Government downgraded the government veterinary investigation centres? Surely at the moment they should be given top priority. I hope that the Minister will give your Lordships and answer today on this matter but, if not, I hope that there will be an explanation as soon as possible.
	Rigorous disinfection of poultry farms is necessary. Recently I asked a farm supplier which disinfectant was best for poultry houses, but my secretary was given the answer that he did not know. I asked a Question for Written Answer to make the need for such disinfectants more widely known, but the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, referred me to Defra's website, where I found a mass of names—about 100 of them. Another agricultural merchant recommended to me a disinfectant called Perax (2), but I have read that the virus is killed by heat and by disinfectants such as formalin and iodine compounds. Perhaps they are all as good as each other.
	The virus can survive at cool temperatures in contaminated manure for at least three months. In water, the virus can survive for up to four days at 22 degrees centigrade. Those figures demonstrate that, without the implementation of strict hygiene measures, the virus may remain as a potential source of infection for months. With regard to the highly pathogenic form of the disease, studies have shown that a single gram of contaminated manure can contain enough virus to infect 1 million birds.
	Should the virus arrive, do the Government recommend vaccination of poultry? I think that it would be wise if basic guidelines went out to people working at ground level, such as gamekeepers, who might find dead birds. They need to be told to wear protective gloves and to double-bag the birds if they take them for examination; or would a Defra technician come and collect them? At what temperature should protective clothing be washed, and should special equipment be used? Is the Minister satisfied that collaboration between the public health and agricultural sectors, the veterinary services and the general public is close enough? The general public need to know.
	An added concern was when I heard that avian influenza could spread to horses. The influenza A virus infects many animals, including pigs, whales, seals, birds, horses and humans, but vets have told me that they believe that the current outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza poses a risk to the horse population in countries where the disease is present. Difficulties of control would arise in creating a vaccine and incorporating it into vaccines with other strains. Also, 70 per cent of the horse population would have to be vaccinated.
	What is the Minister's response to the Times article on 31 October headed "'Mad Cow' rules will halt advance of flu treatment"? Scientists believe that antibodies taken from the blood of recovered flu patients could be used to treat others who develop the disease, providing a third line of defence against a pandemic after vaccines and antiviral drugs, such as Tamiflu. However, the technique could not be used in the UK because of a ban on British blood products in medical therapies introduced seven years ago due to the risk of spreading variant CJD. Surely, as the pharmaceutical industry is world wide, we will have to buy immunoglobulins from countries where there is no risk, should they be needed.
	The H5N1 virus is not the only form of flu which might attack us. Have we enough intensive care and emergency beds, should an epidemic or pandemic emerge? If there are not enough beds for risk people at risk, such as those who have lung problems, will the Government make new money available for the PCTs, which are stretched, and for hospitals, which have already had to cut the number of beds? We should be prepared, and I hope the Minister will answer some of our questions.

Lord Chan: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for asking Her Majesty's Government whether adequate safeguards are in place to deal with a potential outbreak of avian flu.
	The disease, which has attracted wide public attention through the media, has caused confusion, as other noble Lords have mentioned. There are clearly two separate issues involved in avian flu. First, there is an avian flu epidemic of the H5N1 strain in east and south-east Asia. It has now spread to Russia and Kazakhstan. Infected birds have also been identified here. Secondly, the World Health Organisation has advised countries on the preparations necessary to prepare for an influenza pandemic. The latest UK influenza pandemic contingency plan of October 2005 states that the widespread occurrence and continued spread of a highly pathogenic avian (bird) influenza virus H5N1 in poultry in south-east Asia since 2003 has increased concern that this could provide the seedbed for the emergence of a new human influenza virus with pandemic potential.
	I suppose that newspapers would like to expand such reports in portraying what they consider is a likely future scenario. However, at the moment such a scenario is fictional.
	There is no doubt that H5N1 is a virulent infection of birds that has spread. As the noble Lord, Lord Soulsby, said, avian flu is nothing new. China has had recurrent epidemics over 10 years, but it is only since the resurgence of avian flu with H5N1 in 2003 that the spread has been so rapid and that there have been a small number of human deaths. Today, there are 70 proven cases of deaths from the avian flu virus H5N1, and all of them have occurred in China and the south-east Asian countries of Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia.
	Currently, poultry are susceptible to infection by avian flu; we know that from all the experiences of south-east Asian countries. Serious effects would occur on poultry farming if avian flu were to infect our national stock of birds. I look forward to the Minister telling us what will be done and what plans there are for handling such a possibility. I have found at least two documents on pandemic flu, but I have not found any documents on avian flu advice for poultry farmers of the type that have been produced for the NHS.
	It has also been said that a vaccine has been manufactured for use in poultry in China. I was in China two weeks ago and yes, it is true that they have manufactured a vaccine. However, the problem is that the vaccine takes three weeks to produce any immunity, and every bird has to be injected individually. It will be an impossibly long and laborious process for the team that is going to vaccinate the birds. So although the vaccine has been manufactured and is being used and publicised, it is unlikely that the current vaccine would have any impact or use for us here.
	I will now consider the aspects of human infection and the prospect of an influenza pandemic of H5N1. The Department of Health should be congratulated for making detailed plans, first in March and then again in October using WHO recommendations on how to deal with the pandemic. Using statistics, since the last influenza pandemic was from Hong Kong in 1968, it is about time that another should occur in Europe. That is good planning and it should not cause unnecessary fear and alarm in the public—although unfortunately it has. The President of China on his visit here last week voiced his concern about avian flu and asked for our Government's help on research and co-operation on the public health effects of avian flu. There is no doubt that this is an area where we hope that the Government will join in co-operation.
	The report on the first three proven cases of human avian flu from China was in the Times this morning. They were two siblings and another girl from another province in China. All three of them apparently had H5N1 identified in their secretions. Of the two siblings, the girl died but her brother survived although they both had the same illness.
	That seems to be good news, if it is true, because it might lead to work on some way of having immunoglobulins or even a vaccine that might be produced for human use.
	I come back to our own preparations for pandemic flu. Could there be better information for the public than the large tomes produced? In the SARS epidemic, there was tremendous confusion, particularly among the Chinese community, when people stopped going to Chinese restaurants. They then tuned on to Hong Kong television and saw that everyone was wearing facemasks, so they adopted the same procedure here and started telling people that they should not go to public places, not even churches. I hope that, to avoid such confusion, we would produce a user-friendly information sheet.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, I warmly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for introducing the debate, which has been wide-ranging. I intend to touch on only those issues for which Defra is responsible, because I do not feel that I can really touch on the health issues. I want to cover three areas. The debate is particularly timely because, two days ago, Defra published its epidemiology report on the avian influenza outbreak in quarantine, which raises a number of issues about our biosecurity. A wider issue was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Stratford—why we are importing wild birds at all. I concur with him that we should not be. Indeed, I have tabled an amendment to the NERC Bill to that effect.
	I shall go back to the detail of the epidemiology report. I realise that the Minister will not be able to answer all the questions in the time available, but I need to put at least some of them on record. The report raises a large number of questions, about both the principles of importing wild birds and the state of our quarantine system. The mortality in the black-header caique population was notably high—100 per cent—but that was not attributed to any reason. What proportion of legally imported wild birds normally die in quarantine? Are welfare standards really adequate when so many birds can die for no apparent reason? That is a rhetorical question; it clearly is not, because the report goes on to state: "The Mesias", a different species,
	"from Taiwan, also exhibited a notable mortality. This was attributed to nutritional/dietary problems".
	The birds were apparently not being fed correctly.
	I turn to some issues around biosecurity. For example, there were four sentinel chickens, which is a normal way of testing for disease. They were all free of the disease when 53 other birds may have died from it. Does that suggest that the sentinel system is not a reliable safeguard? Another noble Lord raised the habit of tissue pooling in virological testing so that it is impossible to tell from which bird the disease came. That is a serious matter, made more serious by the fact that some birds appear to have been put in the deep freeze afterwards while some were incinerated. On what basis are decisions made on which dead birds will be incinerated and which frozen for testing? If birds simply appear to have died—that is what the epidemiology report says—but only a few have been frozen and the rest incinerated, it will be impossible to go back and have a second look at any of the issues.
	Considering the uncertainty with which the report gives dates for deaths and incinerations, is there any possibility that some of the birds were not burnt at all, but sold before the end of the quarantine period?
	I take on board other noble Lords' comments about not raising the temperature on this issue, but this report raises some questions, particularly given that much of the evidence has been burned.
	I turn now to issues relating to our poultry farmers. In this country we raise poultry under much higher welfare conditions than in the rest of the world. Our poultry keepers look to the Government to support the type of conditions that they are trying to encourage. Therefore, it is fair that at times such as these the Government should offer poultry keepers very clear guidance—the noble Lord, Lord Chan, asked if there was any guidance available to them. I have received several queries from farmers that are basic and surprising, because, for example, I understand that they have not received any guidance regarding compensation levels during an outbreak. There is a lesson here from the foot and mouth outbreak: farmers will be paid compensation for healthy birds that are slaughtered, but the foot and mouth outbreak demonstrated that indirect losses were great. There is no intention to pay for consequential losses, but losses may arise simply from being in a surveillance area or a restricted zone. There is also the question of organic status regarding birds that are shut indoors for a considerable time.
	The Government have stated that they will not finance secondary cleansing. However, if a farmer suffers an outbreak on his farm, his flock will be restricted, with the litter on which it lies, to the farm building. It will stay there for 21 days. The compost that results will then be required to be escorted by a vet to incineration. Is that regulation a sensible use of veterinary time? Of course, biosecurity needs to be ensured, but, surely, we do not need a vet to accompany dead animals and their litter—he should concern himself with the living animals and ensuring that the disease has not spread. The poultry industry is valued at some £1,674 million. We should take seriously our responsibility to support it in every possible way.
	Finally, the Minister and the Government have made many statements about the poultry industry in which they always refer to chickens. But elsewhere in their literature they state that waterfowl are particularly vulnerable. Can the Minister say anything about regulations that may specifically refer to ducks and geese?

The Duke of Montrose: My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lady Byford on this important and timely debate. The egg industry alone in this country has a turnover of some £570 million and 28 million birds produce within a whisker of 9 billion eggs—and that is only one section of the poultry industry. That industry is a considerable consumer of home-grown cereals at a time when that sector of farming is in considerable difficulty.
	Perhaps I may respond to a question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Chan: I talked to a major Scottish poultry producer who seemed satisfied with the communications that he was receiving from Government, but perhaps he is in better communication with the Government than others. I must declare my own interest in farming, although it is not in poultry.
	The noble Lord, Lord Soulsby, drew our attention to a new EU directive that is being prepared. I presume that, given our current national position in the European Union, we will have a fairly major part in its drafting. What new measures do the Government feel that should include? I also understand from a statement by the Minister in the other place that the Government have plans to carry out a contingency exercise on avian influenza outbreaks next June. Following the question put by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, will it contain measures for the general population and what is the rationale of choosing that date? Do they expect to be able to include all the provisions of the new EU directive?
	It appears that we are susceptible to three possible routes of infection into this country: wild bird migration, wild bird trade and the domestic poultry trade. The noble Lord, Lord Stratford, expressed some of the passion that many of us feel about the dangers that this country faces from the importation of animal diseases. I was interested to see that he is another one who subscribes to the feelings of the late Reginald Heber, who said that we live in a world where all of nature pleases and only man is vile.
	We are told that the threat from a major wild bird migration is almost over for the present season. I hope that the Government will not give up on their surveillance of wild bird deaths, as it seems that currently we have very little information on what diseases, if any, the current flow of migrants might be carrying. That might prove to be important if we are required to trace back an outbreak of something rather more dangerous.
	On trade and the infections it brings, proper and adequate quarantine provision is obviously essential. I was interested to learn that the Government are currently carrying out a review of quarantine procedures. That topic, which is of much concern to us all, was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham of Ilton. Was the current review triggered by the latest incident, or is there a provision to update periodically the regulations and, if so, when was that last carried out? It is useful to know that quarantine premises are required to obtain an annual licence and are subject to periodic inspection. In those circumstances, one has to ask whether that is enough.
	If we are still correct in believing that wild birds are capable of transmitting dangerous strains of avian influenza to domesticated stock—I gather there is a slight question mark over that at the moment—it would appear that the most likely route of transmission would be from the trade in wild birds, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, referred. Almost by definition these are birds whose health status is not traceable over a very long period. That does not mean that it is totally necessary to try to stop the trade altogether, but it means that it cannot be seen as a business that should be allowed to operate with light-touch regulation.
	It seems that certain areas could be considered in the current view of quarantine procedures. I hope it will not be seen as out of place for me to make my own suggestions, because in no way am I an expert in such matters. I was interested to learn that the Essex premises, where the recent incident occurred, were regarded as having been vacant from 9 March until 16 September and that they had been inspected within the past few months. Did that inspection coincide with the premises being empty and was the report of the inspection fully satisfactory? A point that the review might like to consider is that, as with other infectious disease outbreaks, it might be better if periods used for carrying out disinfection were subject to official notification and random inspection.
	Secondly, what is the strength of the ruling currently employed which says that all deaths in quarantine should be subject to testing? Is there a time limit by when the tests should be completed? Even if carcases are stored in a refrigerator, by when should they be tested? I am led to believe that even in cold conditions, a virus such as H5N1 deteriorates. Can the negative samples taken from the fridge in Essex be regarded as conclusive?
	My third point is that some value is put on the presence of sentinel birds. In these wild bird quarantine centres, would it not be an idea to have more than one species of sentinel bird? As well as having chickens, perhaps there could be ducks.
	An area of research that was not touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, is the question of testing for this disease. It is good news that our State Veterinary Service is now working on a test that it hopes will reduce the time for an initial result from three days to three hours. Has the Minister anything to tell the House about how long that research has been going on and whether there is any likelihood of bringing it to a rapid conclusion?

Lord Bach: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for giving us the chance to debate this issue in the House tonight. Avian influenza is currently a high-profile topic with the public and it is right that the House should discuss it at this time. Some important and significant points have been made and questions have been asked. I cannot possibly answer them all. It would be impossible to do that within the time available. I shall try to answer what I can and I will write to noble Lords if I cannot answer their questions tonight. By way of example, in the first part of her speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, asked detailed questions about contingency plans. I would not be doing justice to her speech if I tried to answer her this evening, but I will write to her.
	I think it is best if I concentrate on telling the House where the Government believe we are at this time. Indeed, that is what the noble Baroness asked in her question. The first thing is that I remind the House that we do not have an outbreak of high pathogenic avian influenza in this country. The Government continue to monitor closely the risk of such an outbreak in the United Kingdom, and regularly reassess, update and publish their qualitative risk assessment. Indeed, many noble Lords will have seen the most recent QRA, which was made public a week or two ago. The risk of further geographical spread is assessed as high. In that light, the likelihood of the imminent introduction of H5N1 to the UK is assessed as increased, but still low.
	We continue to work closely with the European Union. This led to the European Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health agreeing to a European Union-wide ban on the importation of wild birds on a temporary basis. It was extended yesterday to 31 January 2006. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs remain vigilant on the big issue of the illegal trade or movement of birds. In addition to this, domestic legislation to implement the Commission decision restricting bird shows, fairs and markets came into force in England, Scotland and Wales on 28 October. Today, we have announced advice on allowing pigeon shows to go ahead under licence. We are also developing appropriate provisions to license pigeon racing. This legislation will help to prevent the spread of the avian influenza virus in the event of an outbreak.
	We are working closely with key stakeholders to determine the policy, to design and deliver surveillance arrangements and to agree and issue guidance. Information on issues such as biosecurity and worker protection—the noble Baroness asked about these matters—has been made widely available. With the addition of interested parties we are currently developing a central poultry register to gather essential information about poultry species held on commercial properties for the purposes of risk assessment and the prevention and control of disease. This database will be another safeguard to help identify an outbreak and also to limit its spread. We are continuing our programme of surveillance in wild birds.
	While evidence for the influence of migratory wild birds remains circumstantial, the Government are committed to increase levels of surveillance for possible presence of avian influenza virus. We are working with experts and ornithologists, such as staff at wetlands centres, and have published information regarding all this on the Defra website, which the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, was good enough to mention.
	The noble Lord, Lord Soulsby, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, talked about the international community and what we were doing. We are leading the fight to help the international community to eradicate avian influenza. Recently, we sent a delegation to a meeting hosted in the United States. As holders of the EU presidency, the United Kingdom has co-ordinated views and concerns from all European member states. Another delegation has been sent to Geneva for the WHO/FAO/OIE partners meeting. On a more practical note, we have also sent experts to Romania to help their response to avian influenza. The right reverend Prelate's point is well taken about poultry in that country.
	Aside from the ban on the importation of wild birds, we have provided additional funding in excess of £6 million further to enhance our disease prevention programme, which includes import controls and quarantine procedures. In passing, I tell the noble Baroness that active research is going on—I am sure that she knows that—and we believe that we, in collaboration with other countries, are in the forefront of vaccination development of a new pandemic flu vaccine. But I will write to her at greater length about that.
	The Government have prepared a contingency plan that will come into effect in the event of an outbreak of avian influenza in this country. It is the same plan as was used successfully to manage the outbreak of Newcastle disease earlier this year. It focuses on the early detection of avian influenza and rapid action to contain and control it in the event of an outbreak.
	The contingency plan is routinely checked and tested in local exercises run by the State Veterinary Service, involving key operational partners when it is appropriate to do so. A national scale exercise thoroughly to test this plan is planned for early next year as the culmination of a number of smaller table-top exercises that began in October this year. Separate to that, a strategic level table-top exercise was held on 31 October involving senior officials from a number of government departments and agencies, in order to test the strategic level response arrangements and the communications strategy.
	In the unlikely event of an outbreak of avian flu occurring before there is a supply of vaccine available, we have a substantial stockpile of the antiviral Tamiflu that will be given to all those at risk of infection. We have heard a lot about the recent case of avian influenza in a quarantine centre in Essex. I must say that I have to be cautious about what I say concerning that. It is quite right that the epidemiological report has now been published and that comment was made about it. I still need to be cautious about what I say. This shows, I would argue, that in fact that the quarantine procedures were effective in this case because it gave early warning in preventing H5N1 entering the country, and the country remains free of the disease.
	However, we want to continue to examine ways to improve this system, and a general review of our quarantine procedures and arrangements was announced in October. That matter was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, the noble Duke and many others. The review is being chaired by Professor Nigel Dimmock, the Emeritus Professor of Virology at Warwick University. Indeed, the results of the epidemiological report that I have just referred to will be fed into this important inquiry that is going on into quarantine policy.
	Let me try and deal with some of the questions I was asked. The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, accused us of lacking urgency. I have to remind her that the Government have a duty to take these issues very seriously; and we do. But we also have to make sure that we do not cause unnecessary alarm at the wrong time.
	Government is about balance and trying to get it right. The noble Baroness can say that we have got the balance wrong here, if she wants to; but I argue strongly that we have it right. Regular risk assessments have been taking place. A contingency plan has been in place since July. That was fully tested with the Newcastle disease outbreak. It is updated and fully prepared. Bans need to be proportionate and always based on risk.
	The noble Baroness and other noble Lords mentioned vaccination and the Chinese statement—because that is what it is at present—concerning vaccination. The noble Lord, Lord Chan, was very interesting on that point. There are no vaccines yet in the EU with marketing authorisation. Therefore, we would not be allowed to consume the products of vaccinated poultry. That is a commercial decision for the marketing authorities. However, it is right to point out that a number of factors concerning current vaccines that make them unsuitable as a single disease control measure. There is the fact that every bird would have to be injected and that it can take three weeks to develop immunity. That does not necessarily stop the bird becoming infected and spreading the virus, even though it has been vaccinated. The vaccine can mask signs of disease, which would be very difficult. So there are arguments to be had about vaccination.
	I was asked about the zones. The State Veterinary Service and local authorities work together to publicise locally and visit premises. The same sizes are set out consistent with all animal disease control policy. I was asked about numbers. I can tell the noble Baroness that between 1 January and 9 November this year, a total of 53,155 wild birds were imported into the UK.
	I tell my noble friend Lord Stratford that it is not government policy to cull wild birds. Our policy is to control disease in domestic poultry and to continue to increase biosecurity.
	I was asked about key workers. I will write to the noble Baroness with more detail about that. The noble Lord, Lord Soulsby and the noble Duke mentioned the new directive. We hope to have political agreement by the end of this year to be implemented shortly after that which will enhance the current controls. Controls on low pathogenic AI, controls and surveillance of pigs in particular and regional and national movement restrictions will all be part of the thinking that goes into the new directive.
	I have already run out of time. Finally, the right reverend Prelate asked what instructions have been given to households to prepare for any future pandemic. We have prepared publicity material for the public on avoiding the risks of infection and caring for sick family members and for general practitioners. It will be issued if needed; it has not been issued at present. The Secretary of State for Health has published her pandemic contingency plan and guidance.
	I end by again thanking the noble Baroness for raising the subject today. It has been a short but worthwhile debate. I am sorry that I have not been able to say more in the course of my answer.